Mormon Wars Part 7: The Coming of Civilization
The Civil War interrupted all investigations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. There was never any federal impetus to pursue the matter from Washington for many reasons. Rudely put, there were settlers getting hacked up by Indians and Bushwhackers all over the opening states and territories before, during, and long after the Mountain Meadows incident. 618,000 Americans on both sides died in the war. There were battles, skirmishes, wars and fights and ambushes, death, dying and massacres all over, under, around and through this era. The “Battling Parson” John 
Chittenden was wiping out the Cheyenne at Sand Creek, there was a railroad coming through and immigrants were killing each other off or dying from the workload from one coast to the other. The Dakota were being hung by the score in Minnesota for slaughtering settlers and taking their stuff, which is only fair since the settlers shot at them a lot and took all their stuff first. Custer was getting a little taste of the same at Little Big Horn. Before, after, and during the war, it was Bloody Kansas. It never really stopped being Bloody Kansas. And then you had the rise of the James and Younger gangs, as former rebel militiamen, former “Regulators” dragged on their vendetta for decades against the Yankees and the Union Mr. Lincoln tried to preserve. In the middle of all that horror and upheaval, the 120 members of the Fancher and Baker train were of limited importance. Their horrendous fate seemed not all that horrendous by comparison.
Locally however, in Utah terms, Mountain Meadows did become rapidly and widely known. Anti-Mormonists circulated it as widely as possible as proof that the Mormons were inherent killers and would never be loyal to the federal government. When the transcontinental railway connected in 1869 at Promontory Point in Utah Territory, the attendant telegraph line wired back the first message from the region, a greeting from Brigham Young telling new president Ulysses S Grant that Utah was stalwart and loyal to the Union. This was probably because Lincoln had moved the small residual force of the Utah Expedition to the new Fort Douglas, just up the bench from temple square, and kept a 
cannon trained on Brigham Young’s house all through the war just in case. Brigham probably wanted to reassure the new president that this was no longer necessary. And, after the war, even that sort of overt military intimidation faded. A presidential pardon issued in 1858 had already exempted Brigham Young from any role in the Utah War, which included Mountain Meadows. Had Young maintained that Mountain Meadows had been the action of territorial militia in the course of the Utah War, the entire incident would have been federally pardoned. Brigham however, consistently maintained after the Mormon involvement had been confirmed, that it was not executed by his or any other territorial or church edict and was a civil crime down to those who committed it.
Some years later, in light of Brigham Young’s standing invitation to investigate the crime, and after the extent of the massacre had become more well known, an assistant federal judge named John Cradlebaugh of the territory’s Southern District, decided he had to have a go at somebody. Cradlebaugh primarily wanted to nail Brigham Young for the crime of course. Or any crime. As an avowed Christian, federal “reformer,” he was basing his vendetta principally on just hating Mormons and Brigham Young in particular, but ostensibly upon a more legal premise, the “smoking gun” of the much touted “threat” from Brigham Young’s own lips warning that just such a massacre would result from attempting to take Utah by force. If he could not indict Brigham Young, he set his sights at proving it had been his doing, and convicting as many high LDS officials he could in the matter as his obedient minions, to set an example for others:
The threat uttered by Brigham Young during his interview with Captain Van Vliet, on the 9th of September, 1857, was speedily fulfilled — so speedily that, at first sight, its execution would appear to have been predetermined. “If, he declared, the government dare to force the issue, I shall not hold the Indians by the wrist any longer.” “If the issue comes, you may tell the government to stop all emigration across the continent, for the Indians will kill all who attempt it.” Two days later occurred the Mountain Meadows Massacre, at a point about three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City.
The threat and the deed came so near together as to lead many to believe that one was the result of the other. But a moment’s reflection will show that they were too nearly simultaneous for this to be the case; that in the absence of telegraph and railroad, it would be impossible to execute such a deed three hundred miles away in two days.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ut-mountainmeadow1889account.html
Cradlebaugh took a contingent of the army from Camp Floyd, personally commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston Himself, and began to round up a small number of accused Mormons and attempted to impanel a Grand Jury to use against them. Brigham Young might well have been given a pardon, but that didn’t mean his complicity couldn’t be exposed in the process of convicting his lackeys and accomplices…
…It was not until March 1859 that Judge Cradlebaugh held a session of court at Provo. At this date only six or eight, persons had been committed for trial, and were now in the guard-house at Camp Floyd, some of them being accused of taking part in the massacre and some of other charges.
Accompanied by a military guard, as there was no jail within his district and no other means of securing the prisoners, the judge opened court on the 8th. In his address to the grand jury he specified a number of crimes that had been committed in southern Utah, including the massacre. “To allow these things to pass over,” he observed, “gives a color as if they were done by authority. The very fact of such a case as the Mountain Meadows shows that there was some person high in the estimation of the people, and it was done by that authority…You can know no law but the laws of the United States and the laws you have here. No person can commit crimes and say they are authorized by higher authorities, and if they have any such notions they will have to dispel them.” The grand
jury refused to find bills against any of the accused, and, after remaining in session for a fortnight, were discharged by Cradlebaugh as “a useless appendage to a court of justice,” the judge remarking: “If this court cannot bring you to a proper sense of your duty, it can at least turn the savages held in custody loose upon you.” [He then released a couple of violent felons, two convicted rapists from his incarceration out into the community to teach them a lesson.]
Judge Cradlebaugh’s address was ill advised. The higher authority of which he spoke could mean only the authority of the church, or in other words, of the first presidency; and to condemn and threaten to impeach that authority before a Mormon grand jury was a gross judicial blunder. Though there may have been cause for suspicion, there was no fair color of testimony, and there is none yet, that Brigham or his colleagues were implicated in the massacre.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ut-mountainmeadow1889account.html
A lack of testimony or evidence did not deter Judge Cradlebaugh from trying to nail Brigham Young with something—anything.
“I fear, and I regret to say it,” remarked the superintendent of Indian affairs, in August 1859, “that with certain parties here there is a greater anxiety to connect Brigham Young and other church dignitaries with every criminal offence than diligent endeavor to punish the actual perpetrators of crime.”
The judge’s remarks served no purpose, except to draw forth from the mayor of Provo a protest against the presence of the troops, as an infringement of the rights of American citizens. [Cradlebaugh was also rounding up witnesses and holding them under guard of federal troops.] The judge replied that good American citizens need have no fear of American troops, whereupon the citizens of Provo petitioned Governor Cumming to order their removal. Cumming, who was then at Provo, was officially informed by the mayor that the civil authorities were prepared and ready to keep in safe custody all prisoners arrested for trial, and others whose presence might be necessary. He therefore requested General Johnston to withdraw the force which was then encamped at the court-house, stating that its presence was unnecessary.
The general refused to comply, being sustained in his action by the judges; and on the 27th of March Cumming issued a proclamation protesting against all movements of troops except such as accorded with his own instructions as chief executive magistrate. A few days later the detachment was withdrawn.
Notwithstanding the contumacy of the grand jury, Cradlebaugh continued the sessions of his court, still resolved to bring to justice the parties concerned in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and in crimes committed elsewhere in the territory. Bench-warrants, based on sworn information, were issued against a number of persons, and the United States marshal, aided by a military escort, succeeded in making a few arrests.
…All the efforts of Judge Cradlebaugh availed nothing, and soon afterward he discharged the prisoners and adjourned his court sine die, entering on his docket the following minute: “The whole community presents a united and organized opposition to the proper administration of justice.”
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ut-mountainmeadow1889account.html
When Judge Cradlebaugh first set about bringing down Mormonism with his show-trials and military escort, there wasn’t even a jail in Provo to hold the prisoners from whom he hoped to extort enough evidence to hang Brigham Young. But worse yet than this sort of “official” harassment and usurpation of Constitutional liberty, was the mere presence of the soldiery, camp followers, and similar ilk, brought in by the federal government’s Christian “reform societies.”
With the coming Of the army and the civil officers for Utah, there had been assembled those “reforming agencies” from which so much was expected in the moral regeneration of the Latter-day Saints. The New York Tribune, when the “Expedition” was forming for its journey, remarked, in a vein of irony, perhaps, but representing truly the ideas that obtained in some quarters respecting the “Expedition:
“The impending `Expedition’ against them [the `Mormons'] is enthusiastically regarded as holy war, undertaken in the interest of morality and religion, intended to convert the Mormons to more correct ideas on the subject of matrimonial relations and religious truth; to break up their polygamous households; * * * or should they not be brought to reason as to these matters by the precept and example of the new civil officers, seconded by the officers and soldiers of the army, then to resort to the remedy of dispersing them by fire and sword.”
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church, Volume 4, pg 456
Some of the blessed and wonderful societal improvements brought from Washington’s Christian ministers include many of the local Indians becoming alcoholics who’d trade sex with their women for whiskey, many of the other Indian tribes becoming so pissed off at white men of any sort they began to attack Mormons or Gentiles alike, and a stream of dashing and seemingly gallant army officers leading naïve young Mormon girls into extended visits to Camp Floyd for nefarious purposes, and of course the street riots, riots with the police, public intoxication, lewdness, that president George Albert Smith sums up fairly well:
“Christianity continues to progress with the arrival of its most able expounders and defenders who
preach by precept and example; but much to our gratification, at present, they are practising on each other. Several murders have been committed, two of which have occurred in this city; the mayor of our city has to hold a court every day. Street fights prove rather expensive, but are of frequent occurrence. Our brethren, however, keep out of the way and they [the non- `Mormons'] have the fun all to themselves. Although the annoyance to the people, and drunken sights are disgraceful to the community, they are unavoidable as long as the United States treasury pays the expenses.”
“For want of space we omit the details of rapidly increasing profanity and drunkenness, of the progress of gambling, whoredoms, etc., and for the present merely note the fights as yet most prominent. … As there is a fair prospect for a weekly crop of the thrilling and exciting incidents so common in the world, it is but fair to presume that news from this isolated portion of our country will no longer be quoted as `unimportant.’”
“Police riots,” or “rows with the police,” said an editorial in the Deseret News, “are getting to be of weekly occurrence in our city.” … “It is a matter of regret,” said the editorial account of the affair, “that the professors of civilization (!) and claiming to be the very essence of modern refinement, should be found among those whose orgies make night hideous and our streets dangerous….”
…
“The miserable howling and demoniac yells of the mid- night brawlers, maddened by the
intoxicating draught,” wrote John L. Smith, chief clerk of the territorial legislature, in a letter to Stenhouse, “contrasts strangely with the peace which has ever before reigned in `Deseret’.” As a result of the lawlessness the police force of Salt Lake City was increased by the addition of two hundred members four-fold what if had previously been. Out of the number seven special guards of twenty men in each, were organized; and each guard-group was to furnish men for duty through twenty-four hours– covering the week. “…The expense that has accrued in consequence of their presence and acts, to the corporation and to the county, has been more than double the amount that has been required to suppress and punish crime and support pauperism from the first settlement in the valley in 1847 to July, 1858; and there have been more murders committed and more blood shed in the county within the last eight months, than before, since its organization;” and the county was organized by the general assembly of the “State of Deseret” in December, 1849 -nine years before.
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pgs 460-462 [emphasis mine]
The negative social influence of the “reforming” agents of the federal government was not lost on the newly installed Christian governor Cumming. He found himself surprised to be siding with the very Mormons he’d assumed needed civilizing.
“Mormon” annals do not stand alone in describing this perilous state of community life in Utah during this Camp Floyd period. “The unruly crowd of camp followers which is the inseparable attendant of an army,” wrote Albert G. Brown, Jr., to the Atlantic Monthly, “has concentrated in Salt Lake City, and is in constant contact and conflict with the Mormon population. An apprehension prevails, day after day, that the presence of the army [i.e. in the city] may be demanded there to prevent bloodshed. The governor [Cumming] is alien in his disposition to most of the federal officers; and the judges are probably on their way to the states to resign their commissions.”
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pg 463
“There has been,” wrote Elder John Taylor, of the council of the twelve,”a very riotous, obstreperous and vindictive spirit manifested by our missionary civilizers; who, while they are utterly regardless of common decency themselves, seek to embroil us in difficulties and trouble; and provoke us if possible to commit some overt act to reopen the wounds that have so far been healed, and cause a
renewal of hostilities in the diabolical hope of fattening themselves upon the prey of their victims.”
Relative to the purpose of those who sought to bring about the “renewal of hostilities” that they might “prey upon their victims,” it can be said that at the very height of Judge Cradlebaugh’s effort to incriminate Brigham Young in the Springville homicides, this passage was written of the non “Mormon” merchants: “The merchants of Salt Lake City say that if they cannot get up a collision between the `Mormons’ and the army at this time they will all be `broke’ [fail in business-be ruined] which is equivalent to acknowledging that they are at the bottom of this outrage upon this people.” This at first sight might seem paradoxical; but a collision between the “Mormons” and the army meant reinforcements to the army, an influx of more people, more government contracts, more business hereabouts in Utah-hence the preying upon the “Mormons’ as victims.
—Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pgs 467-468
http://www.yorgalily.org/~yorgasor/church/ComprehensiveHistoryOfTheChurch/hc4.html
And under later gubernatorial appointments, to effect even greater “civilization” of the Mormon populace, the military was moved directly into contact with the Mormon city centers, both in Salt Lake via Camp Douglas, and and Provo, via Camp Rawlins. One of the most notable incidents of this civilizing force was the Provo Riots of 1870:
The next event in Governor Shaffer’s administration following this militia incident is what is known as the “Provo Riots.” Carrying out the plans formulated at Washington for the suppression of “Mormon influence” in Utah, an additional military encampment was made near Provo, known as
Camp Rawlins, named after the late secretary of war in the Grant cabinet. On the night of the 22nd of September, a party of about forty soldiers between the hours of twelve and two o’clock in the night made a raid upon the city of Provo. Before the rioters could be stayed they broke into the residence of City Alderman, William Miller, firing several shots into his bedroom, smashed in doors, and windows and took him prisoner. They broke in the doors and windows and tore down the signs of some of the stores on the principal business street of the town. They surrounded the residence of City Councilman A. F. McDonald, who was absent from home, and demolished every outside door and window of the first floor, sacked the house, scattering the furniture and bedding over the yards and sidewalks. Alderman E. F. Sheets’ house received about the same treatment, and an effort was made to burn the church in the central portion of the town. “The raiders,” said Mayor A. O. Smoot’s telegraphic report to the Salt Lake press, “were armed with United States needle guns, with bayonets and revolvers, and during their rioting they captured several citizens, parading them through the streets, some of whom were severely beaten and bayoneted before they could make their escape.” The rioters were quelled by the assembling of a number of citizens and the firing of a few shots, after which the soldiers fled in the direction of Camp Rawlins.
“CAUSE” OF THE RIOTS
There was no justification for this procedure on the part of the rioters except the refusal of Alderman Miller to rent to the soldiers a hall for the purpose of holding a party; that some of the bishops of
Provo had counseled their young men and young women not to associate with the soldiers of the camp; also that Councilman A. F. McDonald had refused to sell them whiskey. The spirit of the affair may be judged by the shouting and declarations made in the progress of the riot, preserved in the depositions of the citizens made at the time before the proper authorities. The rioters swore “they would use up the four `white houses’–viz. McDonald’s, Sheets’, Mayor Smoot’s, and Brigham Young’s”; that they had come “to run this town”–Provo. “They shouted as they went along the streets `come out you G–d d–d Mormons and Mountain Meadow Massacre-ers,” and further using indecent language and threatening to kill the “Mormons” and take their women from them. They said the `Mormons’ had run this territory long enough, “that they [the "Mormons"] had not got volunteers in the territory now, but had Uncle Sam’s men, who were going to run this town as they G–d d–d pleased. This had been Utah territory, but now it was Uncle Sam’s territory, and they were going to run it, as they had men to back them.” There was some shooting in the streets by the soldiers, and one of their number, by the name of Haws, during the evening, was shot in the shoulder.
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 5 pg 342
Eventually national and regional public outcry moved the events at Mountain Meadows to the fore of all federal judicial priorities in Utah. Washington’s appointed Christian reform agents tried another go or two at old Brother Brigham.
This antagonism between the federal and territorial authorities continued until 1874, at which date an act was passed by congress “in relation to courts and judicial officers in the territory of Utah,” and commonly known as the Poland bill, whereby the summoning of grand and petit juries was regulated, and provision made for the better administration of justice. The first grand jury impanelled under this law was instructed by Jacob S. Boreman, then in charge of the second judicial district, to investigate the Mountain Meadows Massacre and find bills of indictment against the parties implicated. A joint indictment for conspiracy and murder was found against John D. Lee, William H. Dame, Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higbee, Philip Klingensmith, and others. Warrants were issued for their arrest, and after a vigorous search Lee and Dame were captured, the former being found concealed in a hog-pen at a small settlement named Panguitch, on the Sevier River.
After some delay, caused by the difficu
lty in procuring
evidence, the 12th of July, 1875, was appointed for the trial at Beaver City in southern Utah. At eleven o’clock on this day the court was opened, Judge Boreman presiding, but further delay was caused by the absence of witnesses, and the fact that Lee had promised to make a full confession, and thus turn state’s evidence. In his statement the prisoner detailed minutely the plan and circumstances of the tragedy, from the day when the emigrants left Cedar City until the butchery at Mountain Meadows. He avowed that Higbee and Haight played a prominent part in the massacre, which, he declared, was committed in obedience to military orders, but said nothing as to the complicity of the higher dignitaries of the church, by whom it was believed that these orders were issued. The last was the very point that the prosecution desired to establish, its object, compared with which the conviction of the accused was but a minor consideration, being to get at the inner facts of the case. The district attorney refused, therefore, to accept the confession, on the ground that it was not made in good faith. Finally the case was brought to trial on the 23d of July, and the result was that the jury, of whom eight were Mormons, failed to agree, after remaining out of court for three days. Lee was then remanded for a second trial, which was held before the district court at Beaver City between the 13th and 20th of September, 1876, Judge Boreman again presiding.
The court-room was crowded with spectators, who cared little for the accused, but listened with rapt attention to the evidence, which, as they supposed, would certainly implicate the dignitaries of the church. They listened in vain. In opening the case to the jury, the district attorney stated that he came there to try John D. Lee, and not Brigham Young and the Mormon church.
He proposed to prove that Lee had acted in direct opposition to the feelings and wishes of the officers of the Mormon church; that by means of a flag of truce Lee had induced the emigrants to give up their arms; that with his own hands the prisoner had shot two women, and brained a third with the but-end of his rifle; that he had cut the throat of a wounded man, whom he dragged forth from one of the wagons; and that he had gathered up the property of the emigrants and used it or sold it for his own benefit.
These charges, and others relating to incidents that have already been mentioned, were in the main substantiated….
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ut-mountainmeadow1889account.html
Brigham Young however, came out looking pretty good in the whole legal mess, much to the chagrin of those sponsoring the witch hunt.
The first witness examined was Daniel H. Wells, who merely stated that Lee was a man of influence among the Indians, and understood their language sufficiently to converse with them. James Haslem testified that between five and six o’clock on Monday, September 7, 1857, he was ordered by Isaac C. Haight to start for Salt Lake City and with all speed deliver a letter or message to Brigham Young. He arrived at 11 A. M. on the following Thursday, and four hours later was on his way back with the answer. As he set forth, Brigham said to him: “Go with all speed, spare no horse-flesh. The emigrants must not be meddled with, if it takes all Iron county to prevent it. They must go free and unmolested.”
Samuel McMurdy testified that he saw Lee shoot one of the women, and two or three of the sick and wounded who were in the wagons. Jacob Hamblin alleged that soon after the massacre he met Lee within a few miles of Fillmore, when the latter stated that two young girls, who had been hiding in the underbrush at Mountain Meadows, were brought into his presence by a Utah chief. The Indian asked what should be done with them. “They must be shot,” answered Lee; “they are too old to be spared.”
“They are too pretty to be killed,” answered the chief. “Such are my orders,” rejoined Lee; whereupon the Indian shot one of them, and Lee dragged the other to the ground and cut her throat.
On the testimony which we have now before us I will make but one comment. If Haslem’s statement was true, Brigham was clearly no accomplice; if it was false, and his errand to Salt Lake City was a mere trick of the first presidency, it is extremely improbable that Brigham would have betrayed his intention to Van Vliet by using the remarks that he made only two days before the event. Moreover, apart from other considerations, it is impossible to reconcile the latter theory with the shrewd and far-sighted policy of this able leader, who well knew that his militia were no match for the army of Utah, and who would have been the last one to rouse the vengeance of a great nation against his handful of followers.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ut-mountainmeadow1889account-4.html
When all was said and done, all of this Christian prosecutory zeal only found the satisfaction of heaping itself
upon John Doyle Lee. Lee apparently hadn’t heard the maxim: Nobody talks, everybody walks. From the beginning, he began to talk. He did not learn his lesson in his first trial, which ended in a hung jury thanks to some extent to Brigham Young’s hindrance and objection to the particularly biased judges originally staging the hearings—an odd tactic for somebody looking for a scapegoat I must say. But Lee’s mouth kept running, witnesses kept finking on him from out of the woodwork, and ultimately his second trial brought to him a conviction of masterminding the dirty deed. He was executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows, twenty years after the crime, on 28 March, 1877 at the scene of his atrocity.
You can just go right to Lee himself for the details:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leetestimony.html
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/i_r/lee.htm
What really singled out John Lee was self-incrimination, not some conspiracy by Brigham Young to pin the crime on him and him alone. Haight and Dane were ranking ecclesiastical officers and they initiated the whole course of action. But it was John Doyle Lee that spilled his guts, and it was John Doyle Lee who all the little surviving victims pointed fingers at as the man who killed their mommies and daddies. It was John Doyle Lee who invited every Indian and white Mormon co-conspirator to point to him as the patsy, because by then, it was the US army, not Brigham Young they knew they had to appease, and not one of them was going to take any part of the blame if Lee was just blabbing away asking for it. As Cradlebaugh records it:
I recollect of one of them, “John Calvin Sorrow,” after he found he was safe, and before he was brought away from Salt Lake City, although not yet nine years of age, sitting in a contemplative mood, no doubt thinking of the extermination of his family, saying: “Oh, I wish I was a man; I know what I would do; I would shoot John D. Lee; I saw him shoot my mother.”
And well, it was exploiting the theater of traumatized children who were two, three, four, maybe one of them six years old tops, and too young to really be reliable at the time, and then further removed by several years passing, and then only after having been thoroughly contaminated by rumor and fable and self-interested coaching by very biased folks overtly trying to convict the Mormons, any or all of them, of this crime, but for the purposes of a witch hunt, it was quite effective. And by his own admission, John D Lee was a witch.
Because of the tragedy of it all, few care to see the Massacre at Mountain Meadows as essentially comical. The whole episode was very much like a movie made back in the height of the Cold War called, The Russians are
Coming, the Russians are Coming. In that little classic, a Soviet submarine runs aground offshore of a small island community in the Northeast US, when the captain wants to have a closer look at the US just out of curiosity. As the Russian crew sneaks ashore to try to steal a large boat to pull them off the shoals, Ruskie sightings run rampant until the entire village is fully armed and insane, convinced they are the victims of a Soviet invasion force. Sadly, it’s only in Hollywood movies that such scenarios end with everyone sharing a hug, finding new friends, and all concerned heading safely home in the end.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060921/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russians_are_coming
Unlike the “nudge-and-wink” community approval of the Christian KKK, the Taliban, Al-Qaida, or the Irish Republican Army through the years, there was no subtle, brotherly LDS backslapping of the culprits of this immoral crime in gatherings around the fellowship hall and community functions in Mormon circles.John Lee and his fellow Mountain Meadows conspirators were instantly despised in Mormon circles. Mormons wrote nasty folk songs about them.
Sure, John D Lee and his guerrilla terrorists expressed resentment that Brigham Young did not cover their arses in the deal. But they also never alleged that he actually told them to do it. Indeed, not the Indians, not the turncoat Mormon informers, not the apostate Mormon informers, nobody in the deal, while they were spilling their tormented hearts out to the court, could honestly say they had any orders from Brigham Young or anyone he had sent on his behalf, nor had anyone actually seen a written order proposed to be from Brigham Young. As close as they came to it was one written preliminary report that claimed an Indian said that Lee showed him a paper that Lee said was from Brigham Young ordering the Indians to attack the Fancher Party. But Lee denied that ever happened, or that he ever had any such paper nor had he ever heard of any such orders directly from Young. And the Indian never showed in court. It was only years later that Lee concluded that Young must have known all about what they were doing, but this he concluded from allusions
by the two stake presidents Dame and Haight who set him up for the job. And in spite of it being in his best interest to produce such testimony and such papers, Lee did not nor could he. Nor could any of the others. What they all did instead was say they inferred that their course of action is what Brigham Young expected from various sermons they thought they remembered. No one really had any communication with Brigham Young about it at all until after it was over. Many later claimed that Mormon apostle George A Smith, had been travelling ahead of the Fanchers, warning the Saints to stockpile grain because of the oncoming army, and was also telling the Saints, other Saints that nobody ever produced that is, to kill all the passing emigrants–but none of them ever talked to him personally and so that was something they just assumed he was saying or other people had said he was saying. It was a rumor and nothing more. And the fact is, the GA Smith theory was really developed after-the-fact by anti-Mormonists, not the central witnesses.
My Born-Again readers may be disappointed to find out that Brigham Young was not in the business of killing 
passing Christian settlers for vengeance or blood sport. That’s a very titillating fantasy for subsequent generations of foaming evangelicals to indulge while they sit around flattering themselves in Christian coffee houses perpetually waiting for the Rapture to come, and listening to Michael W Smith. But Christianity by comparison, has a two-millennia-long history of overt, highly organized, completely naked, violent aggression against both the non-Christian, and against fellow Christians that any given ruling Christian sect or faction doesn’t think measures up to it. Mountain Meadows is entirely consistent with Christian tradition, not Mormonism. Perhaps John Lee and his brethren momentarily back-slid into Calvinism in the heat of battle. Maybe they were thinking about that other “Reformation,” the one with Calvin and Henry VIII and the Spanish Inquisition and all. There was more than a little blood spilt in that one.
In Mormonism, you have to account for your works before God, and even if “salvation” is assured, your Eternal Reward is based in part upon performance: Your words, your thoughts, and your deeds. It’s doctrines like that which Christians say proves Mormons are not Christians. True. Christians are not required to perform. They are forgiven universally for every sin they have committed, are committing, and will commit. In Christianity, the “saved” pay no consequence for their actions. Not in Mormonism.
Mountain Meadows was a very bad performance. Particularly, by Mormon standards. No Mormon involved could ever have listened to or read very closely the lectures and proclamations of Brigham Young or Joseph Smith about the Constitution’s fundamental, Godly principles, and believe they would escape God’s judgment for their actions at Mountain Meadows. In the words of the era’s official LDS historian, BH Roberts:
The conception was diabolical; the execution of it horrible; and the responsibility for both must rest upon those men who conceived and executed it; for whatever of initiative may or may not have been taken by the Indians in the first assault upon these emigrants, responsibility for this deliberately planned massacre rests not with them.
http://www.mormonwiki.com/Mountain_Meadows_massacre
http://www.greaterthings.com/EzekielConference/press_releases/January24_2005/index.html
I’m not asking you to believe Brigham Young was a prophet of God. Even as a believer, I happily concede that half the gibberish he was postulating about during the Utah War period in particular was sloppy, convoluted, and easily misread or misheard, and begging to be misunderstood. It was classic, “Can no one rid me of this troublesome priest,” material.
http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england
In the words of Horace Greely, concerning Brigham Young’s many unprepared public speeches and sermons:
… “Let him only be sure to talk good sense,” said the great editor of the Tribune, “and I will excuse some bad grammar.” Then the censure:
“But when a preacher is to address a congregation of one to three thousand persons, like that which assembles twice each Sabbath in the
Salt Lake City tabernacle, I insist that a due regard for the economy of time requires that he should prepare himself, by study and reflection, if not by writing, to speak directly to the point. This mortal life is too short and precious to be wasted in listening to rambling, loose-jointed harangues, or even to those which severally consume an hour in the utterance, when they might be boiled down and clarified until they were brought within the compass of half an hour each. A thousand half hours, reverend sir! Have you ever pondered their value? Suppose your time to be worth ten times that of an average hearer; still, to take an extra half hour from a thousand hearers in order to save yourself ten or fifteen hours’ labor in the due and careful preparation of a sermon, is a scandalous waste, which I see not how to justify. Be entreated to repent and amend!” (Overland Journey, p. 220)
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pg 524
As disorganized as the sermons of Brigham Young may have been, the bottom line is that John Doyle Lee was the only man convicted of masterminding and executing the bloodiest massacre in the history of Utah
Territory, and this by his own admission. The chuckleheads who extrapolated the Mountain Meadows Massacre out of anything Brigham Young ever said of wrote, are the same kind of “Mormons” currently on forums and blogs all over the net still parsing out what Cleon Skousen said about the secret nod he got from John A Widtsoe about the “Atonement.” That class of “Mormon” is the very worst-case scenario that Bruce R McConkie was alluding to when he slapped around Eugene England about not sticking to the canon. Lee and his collection of Mormon shite-heads around the Meadows seem to be the 1857 versions of “911Truthers.” They, most of the press of the day, the Christian America Movement that drove them all, were “conspiracy nuts” before the term was coined. Mormon and Christian alike, they all believed Brigham Young and the Mormon church was running the entire world or wanted to:
You have read that I have had an agent in China to mix poison in the tea, to kill all the nation; that I was at the head of the Vigilance Committee in California; that I managed the troubles in Kansas from the beginning to the end; that there is not a liquor-shop or distillery but what Brigham Young dictates it: so state the newspapers. In these and all other accusations of evil-doing, I defy them to produce the first show of evidence against me. It is also asserted that President Buchanan and myself
concocted the plan for the army to come here, with a view to make money…All the army, with its teamsters, hangers-on, and followers, with the judges, and nearly all the rest of the civil officers, amounting to some seventeen thousand men, have been searching diligently for three years to bring one act to light that would criminate me; but they have not been able to trace out one thread or one particle of evidence that would criminate me. Do you know why? Because I walk humbly with my God and do right, so far as I know how. I do no evil to anyone; and as long as I can have faith in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to hinder the wolves from tearing the sheep and devouring them, without putting forth my hand, I shall do so. I can say honestly and truly, before God, and the holy angels, and all men, that not one act of murder or disorder has occurred in this city or territory that I had any knowledge of, any more than a babe a week old, until after the event has transpired. That is the reason they cannot trace any crime to me.98
–Brigham Young, August 12, 1860. Journal of Discourses 8:143
Mormon Wars Part 6: A Perilous Quirk and a Blunder
If the pro-Fancher witnesses, if even the confessions of the masterminds of the Mountain Meadows Massac
re are reliable at all, it only illustrates that John D Lee, Isaac C Haight, and their assassinating fellows, rather than acting as the instruments of God under the command of His living prophet, were instead tragically engaged in playing out a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian called the “Blessed are the Cheesemakers” sketch.
http://www.amazon.com/Monty-Pythons-Brian-Criterion-Collection/dp/1559409010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLUEMj6cwA
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/depositionofbrigham.htm
The entire sequence of actions taken by the Mormon contingent at Mountain Meadows was what previous military generations would call, “FUBAR,” or a whopping “SNAFU,” or in current military parlance, an epic “Clusterf–k.”
You can read all you want about “Blood Atonement,” in the Journal of Discourses, and to paraphrase Bruce R McConkie, you’ll find that Brigham Young contradicts Brigham Young rather a lot during this period. You can also never assume the scribblers who jotted it down got it entirely right-something noted LDS historian BH Roberts cautions against repeatedly, in even the material he quotes as 
reasonably authoritative. The bold assertion that Brigham Young ordered the Fancher Party destroyed however, based upon “Blood Atonement,” is farcical. For one thing, “Blood Atonement,” even as it existed in the form of smoke billowing out the doctrinal hind-end of Brigham Young, could have only ever applied to temple-endowed members who had committed some crime worthy of the death penalty, and then only in some future, imminent Second Coming scenario. It wouldn’t have applied to anyone in the Fancher Party. And for another, without the treacherous butchery at Mountain Meadows, contemporary journalists and eternal historians would have recorded that Brigham Young stood down the combined might of the US military and political machines, won a bloodless war, and pulled off a public relations coup of epic proportions. Mountain Meadows only ruined that boast for Brigham Young. It put his church at greater risk and plagues it to this day.
A few rather critical qualifiers are always omitted in anti-Mormonists’ fanciful claims about widespread, roving “Blood Atoners” in the early Utah period of Mormonism. First of these, is that Joseph Smith only posed the doctrine to the extent that he claimed that the willful shedding of innocent blood was essentially the same as denying the Holy Ghost—the “Unpardonable Sin” in Mormon theology—and thus the universal atonement and resurrection Graced upon all mankind by the shed blood of Christ was not sufficient to compensate for the overtly willful and deliberately evil nature of that particular sin. Joseph Smith’s conception of the principle can also be related to the notion of knowingly participating in the crucifixion of Chr
ist, the ultimate symbol of innocence. Smith’s implication suggested no guarantee of resurrection without some other additional judgment and penance in the hereafter. Secondly, Brigham Young took this concept a step farther, and proposed that willfully surrendering yourself to the justice of the law in mortality, and laying your own life down as penance, was essentially the only true proof of repentance for such a crime. This of course precludes any possibility of some “Danite” revenge squad slitting your throat involuntarily, by force or coercion, having any connection whatsoever to Brigham Young’s concept of “Blood Atonement.” And lastly, while many inflammatory but entirely out-of-context quotes are invariably cited where Brigham Young warns his sinful congregation that it would be better that their blood be spilt than they be allowed to apostatize and turn against the Saints to destroy them, it is never maintained that apostasy is worthy of death in the here-and-now. In fact, omitted from these scandalous harangues in every case, are the sections where Brigham Young qualifies all references to either apostasy, or heinous sex sins, or “Blood Atonement” by clearly explaining that the penalty of death under these “laws” was once practiced in ancient Biblical times (and he cites many specific examples directly from Old Testament Scripture) and at some future date the Lord will return to reinstate these laws and hold the Saints accountable for their immoral conduct.
Young’s point was: Shape up now or pay later. The Lord is a’comin’. Young’s point was not: Shape up now or I’ll have somebody sneak up, hold you down, and cut your balls off or slit your throat.
http://www.shields-research.org/General/blood_atonement.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_atonement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danite
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/atonement.html
On the other hand, Brigham Young’s rhetoric was often highly over-stated and figurative for purposes of emphasis and drama. His ramblings were usually stream-of-consciousness and if you were not there in the moment a mere transcript accurate though it may or may not be, hardly represents the original effect of delivery to a live audience. Anti-Mormonists and general journalistic idiots deliberately highlight only the most foaming of these statements. But it isn’t the anti-Mormonists and journalistic fools who created the fundamental problem of Brigham Young’s fanatical tone, nor that of his fellow LDS authorities in the heat of the day. But bias and yellow journalism, creative editing and ignorant or deliberately misleading commentary easily exacerbated it. Of course, half of my blushing Utah Mormon readers right there are thinking I’m talking about playing with yourself…which is the other part of the problem. Brigham Young far too often gave the Saints credit for more basic intelligence and discernment than many of them actually possessed. And unlike Joseph Smith, Brigham Young had serious trouble just shutting up and leaving any given topic in its original, pure, simple form:
John T
aylor, the third President of the Church, reported: “Some years ago, in Nauvoo, a gentleman in my hearing, a member of the Legislature, asked Joseph Smith how it was that he was enabled to govern so many people, and to preserve such perfect order; remarking at the same time that it was impossible for them to do it anywhere else. Mr. Smith remarked that it was very easy to do that. ‘How?’ responded the gentleman; ‘to us it is very difficult.’ Mr. Smith replied, ‘I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.’ ”3
Brigham Young, the second President of the Church, reported: “The question was asked a great many times of Joseph Smith, by gentlemen who came to see him and his people, ‘How is it that you can control your people so easily? It appears that they do nothing but what you say; how is it that you can govern them so easily?’ Said he, ‘I do not govern them at all. The Lord has revealed certain principles from the heavens by which we are to live in these latter days. The time is drawing near when the Lord is going to gather out His people from the wicked, and He is going to cut short His work in righteousness, and the principles which He has revealed I have taught to the people and they are trying to live according to them, and they control themselves.’ ”4
Joseph Smith’s answer was a single, witty, concise sentence. Brigham Young babbles his way through a foreboding sermon about the End Times and impending doom before he eventually answers the question. But that’s the way Brigham’s mind worked. At any rate, not so witty, not so concise, and a bit foreboding.
But on another occasion Brigham Young did give his short answer to the question of leading the Saints:
“I have had some people ask me how I manage and control the people,” he once remarked. “I do it by telling them the truth and letting them do just as they have a mind to.”…
http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Repudiated_concepts/Blood_atonement
Concise, yes, but again with a slightly risky spin: Sometimes letting people do just as they have a mind to do is a dangerous proposition. More so, when the “truth” is delivered during perilous times, in a bombastic, frightening rhetorical thunderstorm, that could easily be taken out of context and executed far too immediately and literally than intended. In this respect, Mountain Meadows represents just the sort of total cock-up that arises from Mormonism’s schizophrenic approach to divining what actual Mormon doctrine is or isn’t particularly since the murder of Joseph Smith. The problem at Mountain Meadows was not as often claimed, that the Saints are mind-numbed robots and slaves. Rather, that they really are by-and-large free to do whatever it is they feel the Lord would have them do. Most of the time this leads to moving in big, cumbersome, benign clusters of warm and fuzzy do-gooders. Sometimes, however, individually, or in smaller groups, they simply aren’t singing off the same page as either God or the Brethren.
As Brigham Young put it, regarding his alleged involvement in Mountain Meadows:
There is a gentleman here this afternoon who has said that he knows all about it. If he does, why does he not tell of it; and privately he places the murder upon President Brigham Young? Why do you not testify to what you know before the Courts? If President Young is guilty of any such crime, trace it to him. There are some things that Brigham has said he would do; but has never happened to do them; and that is not all, he prays fervently, to his Father and God that he may never be brought into circumstances to be obliged to shed human blood. He never has yet been brought into such a position. Still, let me find a dog in my bedroom, I would not say that he would be very safe; I hope he will never get there….
…
I do not care about the outsiders hearing this, as their opinion is neither here nor there to me; the Saints, however, are welcome to my views upon this matter. If the outsiders think that I am guilty of the crime, let them trace it to me and prove it on me. If any man, woman or child that ever lived has said that Brigham Young ever counseled them to commit crime of any description, they are liars in the face of heaven. If I am guilty of any such thing, let it be proved on me, and not go sneaking around insinuating that Brigham knows all about it.16
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html#en15
Or you can read what Brigham Young argued directly, during the peace summit between the incoming Governor Cumming, the Army, and the Saints:
I am a man of peace, and not of war…. But friends, should we throw ourselves in the attitude of defense against the advancing columns of the army, it brings hostilities and bloodshed immediately. Let us drop upon this army and crush it in pieces, and it will not end there…. I was in favor of stopping the army last fall, we gained by that means a winter’s quiet…. And again our religion forbids the shedding of blood, and inspires dread of the consequences; and above all things the shedding of innocent blood. We are informed, upon reliable authority, that there are many in that army that do not thirst for out blood—a portion of the soldiers do not want to kill us, and some of the officers do not desire our destruction; so that in coming in contact with those soldiers we would be compelled to put to death those who do not want to kill us, and in this way we might be brought into a position to shed innocent blood, though in justifiable self-defense. Had the administration sent volunteers, who in their hearts desired to murder us, and who enlisted expressly for that purpose, it would have been far different. Should we be compelled to kill them, we would kill those only, who in their hearts had desired to shed out blood, and voluntarily walked twelve hundred miles to accomplish it.”
–Comprehensive History of the Church, Volume 4, pg 430
http://www.yorgalily.org/~yorgasor/church/ComprehensiveHistoryOfTheChurch/hc4.html
The Mountain Meadows travesty was perpetrated by loyal, well-meaning, devout Latter-day Saints, every one of whom claimed he thought he was doing the Lord’s work according to what they understood of the ramblings of their president, prophet and Governor, Brigham Young. Then again, I guess, you can’t put all of th
at down to Brigham Young’s poorly organized, extemporaneous sermonizing habits. In fairness, you don’t have to look very hard in the Bible to find God telling Moses to utterly obliterate whole tribes and societies, man, woman, child, dog, cat and livestock. The catch is, did God tell Brigham Young to wipe out the Fanchers, and in Mosaic fashion, did Brigham Young pass on God’s revealed demands to Isaac C Haight, John D Lee and the other Mormon hit-men at Mountain Meadows? No. Not a shred of solid, legal evidence suggests that. Though John Lee is the only man convicted in the crime, not even he claims he was given any orders of any sort from Brigham Young. Lee says that Isaac Haight told him that it was yet another local Mormon stake president, William Dame, who passed on the authorization to kill off the Fanchers. Dame however, said it was down to Haight. It was in fact, Haight and Dame both who instigated the pissing and moaning session that turned into an assassination squad, not either Lee or Brigham Young.
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/num/31.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_atonement
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leeaccount.html
The alleged Mormon “Danite” bands of Mormon “Avenging Angels,” such as they were, amounted to small-time versions of the Warsaw Regulators or any of the other spontaneous, grass-roots American Regulator Movement so-called “folk heroes.” In fact, the whole model of Brigham Young as an omnipotent, omniscient, cultic master is a failed notion. The existence of Mormon “Regulators” only proves this, because both he and Joseph Smith were outspokenly against mob justice or revenge. Brigham Young war notably on record against the entire concept. Just a few years before Mountain Meadows, there was a little feud between the same Utah Saints and the Utes kicked off by a Mormon settler nosing into an Indian domestic dispute, called the “Walker War.”
Instead of following a conciliatory policy as Young had directed, Mormon settlers responded in brutal kind. A militia unit in Utah County assaulted a Ute camp near Goshen, killing four or five people. At Nephi, on October 2, 1853, after eight or nine Utes came to the fort seeking protection, a group of townspeople slaughtered them “like so many dogs” and then reported the murders as deaths during a skirmish.
Undoubtedly, the murders with the greatest long-range consequence occurred on the early morning of October 26, 1853, when Capt. John W. Gunnison of the Corps of Topographical Engineers and a party of seven had camped on the lower Sevier River in Pahvant territory. The murder of Gunnison and his party by the Pahvants may have come in retaliation for the death of a Pahvant killed by members of a passing wagon train. Alternatively, the deaths–like those of settlers working outside in small parties–may have resulted from their distance because of fortified settlements. More seriously for the Utah settlers, however, anti-Mormons attributed the death to Mormons acting under Brigham Young’s instructions.
http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/thewalkerwar.html
Brigham Young sitting on his allegedly god-like butt in Salt Lake City clearly did not wield absolute control over his flock. His Saints obviously did not always heed even direct orders. And he certainly had no omnipotent control over the Native Americans. And before there ever was a Utah War or a Massacre at Mountain Meadows, anti-Mormonists were wild and eager to blame even the most unrelated and pointless murders, by Indians or anyone else, upon Brigham Young. It fit their narrative. Young was already billed as a murdering tyrant and there had to be examples to “prove” it. It made no difference to the rabid, popular, politically-aligned press if slaughtering Gunnison’s mapping party was entirely counter-productive to Brigham Young’s interest. It was more important to “prove” the Mormons to be wicked savages.
But, yes, of course the Danites existed brother and sister Mormon! They weren’t much to brag about, were hit-and-miss, didn’t last long, and neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young ever had any particular involvement in these clandestine vigilante operations because they both preferred to organize avenging squads of Mormon defenders out in the open with horses, 
grand hats, ceremonial swords and nifty uniforms. When the mostly hyperbolic, mostly mythical Mormon “Danites” ever really were out avenging the blood of the Saints, there was nothing very clandestine about them at all. The were shooting at mobs in full view, telling the bastards just who was doing the shooting and why.
Every settlement of any size all across the United States of America in the early Mormon era had some group of lunk-heads who tagged themselves with some dangerous-sounding gang name, put flour-bags on their heads or dressed like Indians or snuck around and took revenge or put down whatever social ills their local clergy or elected officials told them was threatening their little world. Jackasses in every society inevitably do that sort of thing all on their own. Mountain Meadows was just a variation of the theme, and though the culprits in that vile butchery may have all thought they were doing the Lord’s work, Haight and Lee and Dame and company, were just wingin’ it on the spur of the moment.
The simple, self-interested truth is, Mountain Meadows is a debacle entirely uncharacteristic of Brigham Young’s machinations. If Mountain Meadows had been a Brigham Young operation, and the point was to keep it a secret, I wouldn’t be writing about it today because none of us would have ever heard of Mountain Meadows.
Mountain who? What?
Perry Brocchus, a comrade of the later infamous liar and detested whoremonger, Judge WW Drummond, was a partner with the several “run away officials” who returned to Washington in 1851 to complain about their treatment in Utah Territory. Brocchus in particular, claimed Brigham Young had ordered his assassination. Somehow, in spite of Brigham Young’s orders to kill him, he, and then a few years later Drummond, along with the celebrated fired mail contractor William MF Magraw, and many others in-between, all eluded the allegedly bloodthirsty Mormons surrounding them all the way back to the East to make their protests. Brigham Young referenced Brocchus’ charge, in speaking about press accounts of the judge’s “escape” to the East:
It is true, as it is said in the Report of these officers, if I had crooked my little finger, he would have been used up, but I did not bend it. If I had, the sisters alone felt indignant enough to have chopped him in pieces. I did not, however, do it, but suffered him to fill up the measure of his shame and iniquity until his cup is running over. He was not hurt in the least.19
–Brigham Young, June 19, 1853. Journal of Discourses 1:186-187.
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_Officials_of_1851
http://familyhistory123.com/haggard/stories_virgin/GREENHALGH_echocanyonwar.htm
Brigham Young probably had a twinkle in his eye that was returned with a grin from his immediate congregation, all knowing full well he was merely poking fun of his marveled omnipotence as boasted by the Eastern press. But you don’t see that in the transcript. It doesn’t read so whimsically years later in naked print. Many other innocent but highly sarcastic comments have come back to haunt his church over the years.
For instance, it is claimed that Young warned Utah Expedition representatives that if it sent an Army to repress his people he would cease to hold back the hand of the Native population, and Mountain Meadows was the execution of this threat. That’s a preposterous interpretation. Rather, Brigham Young had fought for years to establish a peaceful coexistence with the Indians
and all he meant by this warning was that belligerent emigrant trains and an inflammatory army presence would make it impossible for him to continue to justify and defend hostile American Christian incursions into Indian territory. To do so would be endangering his own people. He made this warning two days before the slaughter at Mountain Meadows. The conflict by then had already been engaged for days. Mountain Meadows is over three-hundred miles down the trail from Brigham Young’s office. It is in the middle of nowhere even today. There were no cell towers in 1857. It was a three-day ride one-way with a fast horse and mount-changing stations. Yet reading Young’s warning in 20/20 hindsight, unaware of timelines and distances, it may seem incriminating. He couldn’t however, have possibly known what was going on with the Fancher Party the local Indians or his Mormon satellites in southern Utah, or even that the Fanchers were still in the territory.
The rider who had been dispatched to Brigham Young for specific instructions about the Fanchers, returned two days after the atrocity with this:
President Young’s express message of reply to Haight, dated September 10, arrived in Cedar City two days after the massacre. His letter reported recent news that no U.S. troops would be able to reach the territory before winter. “So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed for our heads,” he wrote.
“In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements,” Young continued, “we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of[.] [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert, on hand and always ready we should also possess ourselves in patience, preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules.”6
Mormonism’s greatest sin in this business, Christianity’s deepest condemnation of the Latter-day Saints in this offense, if the whole truth were told, is that these white Mormons chose to side with the ”red” race over fellow whites. And why not? It makes perfect sense to both Indian and Mormon alike, to team up to eliminate mutual enemies who have sworn to destroy both their ways of life, and repeatedly demonstrated the power and means to do so. Brigham Young, in his 1857 declaration of martial law, noted prominently that the Mormons had found more help and friendship amongst the “savage” Native Americans than they ever found amongst their “own.” This friendly relationship with Native America is one of the first things the entrance of the Utah Expedition deliberately destroyed. The army eventually removed all the local Indians to a system of reservations. Plainly speaking, Mormons, unlike “white” or “Christian” America, counted atrocities committed against the Indians as no less a crime than the abuse of any other human being:
I spoke a harsh word here yesterday with regard to a man who professes to be a Latter-day Saint who has been guilty of killing an innocent Indian. I say today that he is just as much a murderer through killing that Indian, as he would have been had he shot down a white man. To slay an innocent person is murder according to the law of Moses. Not that we believe that the law of Moses should, in all its bearings, be observed by us; but we believe that it has been fulfilled in a great measure with regard to the law of sacrifice. The Lord said to Noah, before the law was given to Moses: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man.” Those who shed the blood of the innocent at the present day will have to pay the penalty here, or come short of receiving the glory and the peace which they anticipate receiving hereafter. This may appear very hard and unreasonable to some.70
–Brigham Young, July 28, 1866. Journal of Discourses 11:263-264
If forced to choose between the forces of “Christian America” and the Native American “savages”—even given small feuds occasionally fought between isolated groups of Mormon settlers and Native parties—the Mormons would likely choose the Native Americans every time:
There came a captain with troops into this city: they were a specimen of the virtue and morality of the United States. They came here and began to insult the people, and then tried to cover up their wickedness by the dignity of Uncle Samdom. Passing along, they came to a lone house, and there undertook to ravish a woman in open daylight; and the brother who interfered to prevent this villainous outrage was most shamefully maltreated by them, and got some of his bones broken. After this outrage, the officers of the company were soon told that if they did not take their troops out of the city, the “Mormons” would cut all their damned throats; and that was the last we had of them here.69
–George A. Smith, August 2, 1857. Journal of Discourses 5:109
Now, all this tough, vigilante talk from Mormon leadership was nothing to do with “Blood Atonement.” It was
the wild west. And for all of it, there was really only one clearly documentable case of “vigilante” retribution attributable to significant LDS authority apart from the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That was the case of Bishop Warren S. Snow and his admitted victim, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Lewis. His champions claim he was only guilty of wanting to marry a young woman that was desired by this older bishop as a plural wife. What really happened however, was that a party of highly offended Mormons, led by a rather bitter local bishop, intercepted this convicted rapist while being transported to prison, and aided by friends and family of his victim, performed a rather unpleasant surgical castration. But again, that was pretty much a standard practice in the old west. There is a rumor of another similar incident later on, but it is only vaguely documented, and may be the same incident repeated with a later date tacked on as an urban legend. In that case the victim was alleged to have been convicted of incest, resulting in a similar response from friends and relatives. These friends and relatives on both cases of course, are retold as “Danites” under orders of Brigham Young. Castrating sexual criminals however, has not the slightest thing to do with “Blood Atonement.” Not even vaguely. It’s just good old vengeance.
http://en.fairmormon.org/Utah/Crime_and_violence/Castration_in_the_1800′s
John D Lee of course, gave reams of testimony in court, and combined with his journal, proceeded to attribute every single unsolved murder in the territory for years to Mormon “Blood Atonement,” including the incidents alleged above. He and his fellow paranoids consistently allude to disappearances, and people who may have just left the state, as victims of Danite death squads.
One alleged incident that may have some merit:
“Rasmos Anderson was a Danish man who came to Utah… He had married a widow lady somewhat older than himself… At one of the meetings during the reformation Anderson and his step-daughter confessed that they had committed adultery… they were rebaptized and received into full membership. They were then placed under covenant that if they again committed adultery, Anderson should suffer death. Soon after this a charge was laid against Anderson before the Council, accusing him of adultery with his step-daughter. This Council was composed of Klingensmith and his two counselors; it was the Bishop’s Council. Without giving Anderson any chance to defend himself or make a statement, the Council voted that Anderson must die for violating his covenants. Klingensmith went to Anderson and notified him that the orders were that he must die by having his throat cut, so that the running of his blood would atone for his sins. Anderson, being a firm believer in the doctrines and teachings of the Mormon Church, made no objections… His wife was ordered to prepare a suit of clean clothing, in which to have her husband buried… she being directed to tell those who should inquire after her husband that he had gone to California.
“Klingensmith, James Haslem, Daniel McFarland and John M. Higbee dug a grave in the field near Cedar City, and that night, about 12 o’clock, went to Anderson’s house and ordered him to make ready to obey Council. Anderson got up… and without a word of remonstrance accompanied those that he believed were carrying out the will of the “Almighty God.” They went to the place where the grave was prepared; Anderson knelt upon the side of the grave and prayed. Klingensmith and his company then cut Anderson’s throat from ear to ear and held him so that his blood ran into the grave.
“As soon as he was dead they dressed him in his clean clothes, threw him into the grave and buried him. They then carried his bloody clothing back to his family, and gave them to his wife to wash… She obeyed their orders…. Anderson was killed just before the Mountain Meadows massacre. The killing of Anderson was then considered a religious duty and a just act. It was justified by all the people, for they were bound by the same covenants, and the least word of objection to thus treating the man who had broken his covenant would have brought the same fate upon the person who was so foolish as to raise his voice against any act committed by order of the Church authorities.”
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/atonement.html
As a point of order, a local Mormon bishop is not the ranking ecclesiastical authority relative to any endowed or “covenanted” member. In fact, the church is lousy with bishops. They practically sweep them up off the streets, shovel them into a suit and tie, work them a while, and then trade them out every few years for another. A bishop’s court has no authority even to disfellowship or excommunicate a Melchizedek Priesthood holder as Anderson would have to have been. A bishop is merely an entirely untrained, unpaid parish priest in the Mormon system of church government who largely administers the temporal functions of a local meetinghouse and attendant “ward” or district. A stake president, also unpaid and uneducated by any accredited religious regimen, something of an “archbishop,” as the presiding high priest in the equivalent of a Mormon “diocese,” and a court of the stake’s High Council would have to be called to put any Melchizedek priesthood holder on trial for anything, much less incest, adultery, or slitting his throat. And of course, testimony and witnesses are required unless the accused refuses them. The whole system is run by volunteers in any case.
When investigated, stories like these always sound a bit “off” and start with a few internal irregularities. In the end they usually reveal that the evidence is always in the possession of someone else at some other location, or “stifled” by the “Danites” and thus unavailable. In this case, the whole “court” procedure and order is wrong, and no other witness, no grave, no rotted corpse was ever found or dug up. Anderson may have simply just “R-U-N-N-O-F-T” to California after repeatedly committing incest with his wife’s daughter—perhaps to avoid a castration, ball-busting, or similar testicular retribution from friends or relatives of the bride. Or, as Lee insists, he and his friends in southern Utah may have just been that stupid and they actually did slit his incestuous throat with his own permission. But it remains inescapably, that John Lee told and wrote and spread this and many other stories for years and years and remained remarkably un-murdered by Danite assassins. A host of other witnesses at his two trials als
o exposed the whole messy business of Mountain Meadows and much more, and also remained notably un-“Blood Atoned.”
Multiple generations of anti-Mormonists have “exposed” every “secret” plot, scheme, murder, treachery and intrigue of the LDS faith and the Mormon church. Why is it then, that none of these prime subjects for summary “Blood Atonement,” revenge and Danite silencing, ever get silenced? Why does it always turn out to be some rapist, or flim-flam artist, or serial adulterist and fornicator who ends up with his balls hacked off or his throat slit instead? Why is it always some cad with gambling debts, a severe drinking problem, a police jacket for felonious and usually violent crimes, who gets pointed to as the “victim” of Mormon assassination? Seems like the Danites and the Avenging Angels over these many generations have wasted a lot of time and energy on singular arseholes and strictly personal issues that don’t really matter a damn to the church or nation as a whole. Seems like Danites ironically go out of their way to ignore all the very mouthiest, secret-spilling, slander and libel masters of the nation’s anti-Mormonist trade. It seems like Mormon Avenging Angels just have no interest in the prime enemies of Mormonism–culprits you would think that any good Danite assassin would be happily murdering on a regular basis.
Now, John Lee is a cold blooded mass-murderer by his own confession. Anti-Mormonists somehow have no end of affection for anything he has to say however. They say he’s just a scapegoat. Did I mention that John Lee was not convicted by Brigham Young’s High Council? It was the United States Judicial System that nailed him. It was a very biased, anti-Mormon, US Army-protected and enforced Federal Court. It was run by federally appointed Christians, not Mormons. It was a court Washington had initially been perfectly happy never to convene and would not have ever done so had Brigham Young not repeatedly encouraged the investigation. Did I mention that in spite of Lee and many others, including the entire panel of federal judges, the army, and every Gentile in the territory, desperately wanting to incriminate Brigham Young, they succeeded in doing nothing of the sort by any shred of legal standard. And did I mention that this was due to Lee in particular testifying that Brigham Young could not have known anything about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or any Mormon involvement in it before-the fact?
Sure, there were probably vigilante justice squads and lynch mobs and plenty of Mormons who wreaked homespun justice upon the convicted guilty and even the very suspected guilty of Utah territory. But only at a rate 10% of what was going on in the surrounding frontier West. Some years later, at a time when Mormons had essentially no vote or office or any role in civil government or the court systems by federal legislation, Mormons under empirical analysis, were found to have committed only a fraction of the demonstrable crimes that were being committed wholesale by “civilized” and “Christian” America in the same territory:
We are, as I have said, represented as a very bad people, and I want to show a comparison between us and our reformers, or those that profess to be our reformers in relation to these matters…”At the above estimate of population the ratio or percentage would be one prisoner to every 10,000 Mormons, or one hundredth of one per cent, and of the Gentiles one convict in every 909, or about one ninth of one per cent.” So that the actual proportion of criminals is more than ten times greater among the Gentiles of Utah, with the above very liberal estimate, than among the Mormons. It is urged that these non-Mormon prisoners are not a fair representation of the average of crime throughout the country, but are the result of the flow of the desperate classes westward to the borders of civilization; with greater truth we reply that the Mormon prisoners are not representatives of Mormonism, nor the results of Mormonism, but of the consequences of a departure from Mormon principles; and of the 13 prisoners classed as “Mormons,” the greater portion were only so by family connection or association…As I have said before, if we were not on the defensive in this case, I would say nothing about these things; but it ill becomes men who have got ten criminals to our one to come here as our reformers, and try to disfranchise men who are ten times as good as they are. These are facts that are not of my getting up. They come from the public records and can be verified by the prison and other statistics. And the question is, how much of that rule do we want here?52
–John Taylor, October 6, 1884. Journal of Discourses 25:314
The looking glass of history indeed, exposes Mormonism’s Christian “civilizers” as Utah Territory’s primary evildoers:
James Buchanan did all he could do, and when he found he could do nothing, he sent a pardon here. What did he pardon us for? He was the man that had transgressed the laws, and had trampled the Constitution of the United States under his feet. We had neither transgressed against the one nor violated the other. But we did receive his pardon, you know, and when they find out they can do nothing they will be sending on their pardons again… There is not much danger, however, from that quarter. But are they not sending troops on here? Yes; and they will have plenty for them to do. Eleven thousand were ordered here by James Buchanan; seven thousand arrived, and about ten thousand hangers on—gamblers, thieves, and so forth. It made a pretty good army, but what did they accomplish? They used one another up. I recollect in the days of Camp Floyd it was thought nothing of to hear every morning to two or three men being killed; but now, if one is killed about once in six months all hell is on the move. If the whisky drinkers and gamblers who were here to winter, were to go to work, and kill off a few of themselves every night, it would stop all excitement about killing. What would be said if the United States mail were robbed in this neighborhood, as it is east, west, and north of this city every few weeks? It would be thought that we were becoming civilized; but in the absence of frequent deeds of this character, whenever a scoundrel meets with his just deserts here, there is a great outcry raised.74
–Brigham Young, February 10, 1867. Journal of Discourses 11:323
Mormon Wars Part 5: Rumors of Rumors of War
I don’t mean to be crude, I’m just instinctively good at it. I don’t mean to piss people off, but it does come 
naturally. If I wanted to, I could turn tables on the anti-Mormonists and take the show on the road, fighting fire with fire. I could set the Inquisition and Calvin’s Geneva to music, sing and dance around, mocking the thousands of years of Christian torture, gore, and warfare. I could do it all dressed in silly hats and funny costumes like a pope or a puritan. That’s exactly what Christian America has bee
n doing to Mormonism since its birth, and I mean literally that and worse. While the same Christians, many of them anyway, would be shocked and embarrassed at the same sort of open and utter contempt directed at gays, or Native Americans, or Catholics, or other ethnic or religious minorities, they think nothing when they or any of their fellows squat down and dump any volume or variety of crap all over the Mormons. Accepting at face value that Mormons are somehow uniquely weird or particularly dangerous is to this day still a national 
bias still sanctioned by federal law.
One of the first crusading, “Christian” federal authorities to impose himself upon the Mormon community by law and force of arms was one Judge John Cradlebaugh, a federalist, Christian reformer, who rode out with Johnston’s army in the Utah War of 1857, and set up shop in Provo. He immediately used the nearby US army to facilitate his desire to convict Brigham Young of masterminding the Mountain Meadows Massacre–as soon as he heard about it. Naturally, neither he nor anyone else at the time knew anything about what really went on, but in his mind it all had to be down to Brigham Young and so that’s all that mattered. Instead of hanging Mormon
ism however, Cradlebaugh was back-handed by the incoming Christian governor Alfred Cumming for causing trouble and over-stepping his authority. He was also reprimanded by the US Attorney General for terrorizing witnesses and juries by military force. Notwithstanding the friendly disposition of the new, certifiably Christian governor himself, the press of the day, inextricably linked to party-loyal political advocacy, preferred Cradlebaugh’s burlesque version of life under Mormonism:
DAILY CLEVELAND HERALD.
Vol. XXVI. Cleveland, Ohio, Sat., March 24, 1860. No. 71.
Judge Cradlebaugh on Mormonism
One of the Judges of the Territory of Utah is the Hon. John Cradlebaugh of Circleville. He was sent out by Mr. Buchanan at the time Gov. Cumming went out. The Governor turned Mormon, opposed the Judges in their efforts to ferret out Mormon crimes, and the Judiciary were powerless. The Administration sides with Governor Cumming.
Judge Cradlebaugh lately delivered a lecture at Circleville upon Mormonism. We make an extract:
…The little education the children get consists in preparing them for the reception of polygamy. So at variance is that practice with all the instincts of humanity that it has to be pressed upon the people with great assiduity as a part of their religious duty. To prepare the women for the reception of the revolting practice it is necessary to brutalize them by destroying their modesty. The sentiment of love is ridiculed, cavalier gallantry and attentions are laughed at; the emblematic devices of lovers and the winning kindness that with us they dote on are hooted at in Utah. The lesson they are taught, and that is inculcated above all others, is “increase and multiply,” in order that Zion may be filled. The young people are familiarized to indecent exposures of all kinds; the Mormons call their wives their cattle; they choose them pretty much as they choose their cattle; and that great pibk of delicacy, Heber C. Kimball, the next in prominence, as also the next in sin, to Young, calls his women his cows.
…The reverend Mormon bishops, apostles, and the presidents of stakes have as many as they desire, and it is a common thing to see these hoary-headed old Turks surrounded by a troop of robust young wives. The common people take as many as they can support, and it is not uncommon to see a house with but two rooms inhabited by a man, his half-dozen of wives, and a proportionate number of children, like rabbits in a warren, and resembling very much the happy family that we read of — the prairie dog, the owl, and the rabbit. Incest is common….
The ill-assorted children — the offspring of one father and many mothers — run about like so many wild animals. The first thing they do, after learning vulgarity, is to wear a leather belt with a butcher-knife stuck in it; and the next is to steal from the Gentiles; then to ride animals; and as soon as they can, “by hook or by crook,” get a horse, a pair of jingling Mexican spurs and a revolver, they are then Mormon cavaliers, and are fit to steal, rob, and murder emigrants. The women and girls are coarse, masculine and uneducated, and are mostly drafted from the lowest stages of society. It is but seldom you meet handsome or attractive women among them.
…Women that are young and pretty are greedily caught up by the apostles and dignitaries to swell their harems, while the old and ugly are left to care for themselves, or sometimes the prophet forces them on a reluctant husband, that he may avail himself of their labor.
Cradlebaugh’s depiction of plural marriage was vigorously contradicted not only by the Christian governor he followed out 
to Utah, but a host of other visiting dignitaries and journalists. Cradlebaugh’s testimony however, validated the US government’s united effort to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It rationalized the administration’s controversial decision to send a huge military body to force “civilization” upon the Mormons. Governor Cumming’s testimony on the other hand, made the Buchanan administration and all who supported the Utah Expedition look like bigoted idiots. Easily fixed: Cumming is quickly labeled a turncoat, thus invalidating anything further he might have to say about it.
(When you’re on a witch hunt, it’s always easy to exclude any witness who’s testimony would vindicate the old biddy you want to light up like a Roman candle, by pointing dramatically to the witness and claiming you saw them talking to Satan in the form of their pet kitty or that you saw them transform into a barnyard animal or something.)
The whole Christian recruitment shtick is built around frightening you into signing up. Then frightening you into paying up. Then frightening you into eliminating all of your clergy’s competition so there are no other options out there capable of soliciting your membership and guaranteeing you a heavenly reward. Otherwise: Hell awaits.
In the spring of 1857, it became obvious to Christian America that there was a rapidly growing, attractive, 
viable, openly blossoming alternative to their national Christian program. It wasn’t scary enough just to say that the Utah Mormons were all fat and happy, but even so, it was still pretty crappy trying to live out there if you weren’t one of them because they make you feel all left-out and that hurts your feelings. The Mormons had to be seen as miserable wretches living like animals. If there weren’t any tangible social consequences to following a living prophet, or taking multiple wives, well, Christian America didn’t really have a case against Mormonism, and no excuse to butt into their business. The prophet had to be despotic and the institution of plural marriage had to be inherently depraved. That was the narrative they had contrived and that was what they needed to sell to the American public.
By 1857, after three decades of trumping up whole states, whole regions full of violent, Mormon-killing mobs via a strategy of non-stop mockery, slander, bold assertion, rumor and innuendo, Christian America as an entire nation called an open war upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Christian America shouted from the presses and the pulpits that the federal government must eradicate Mormonism instantly, before the entire nation was at Brigham Young’s evil mercy. The more Christian they were, the more the American citizenry believed in the urgency of exterminating Mormonism.
But still, the political and religious classes had to provide this anxious public with a convincing pretext out of which they would appear to organically trigger the sort of overwhelming force and violence required to get the job of Mormon extermination done once and for all. The Christian Movers and Shakers of the American expansion didn’t want to teach the Mormons a lesson, or “contain” the festering Mormon influence upon America’s frontier development. They 
wanted to be rid of them. Period. And to this end, America’s collective conscience had to be perfectly satisfied that the Mormons really, really had it coming.
It had been hoped after their regional expulsion from the Midwest, that the Mormons would straggle their sorry arses out into no-man’s land, piddle their life’s-blood away into the barren, infertile desert, and soon be sucked dry, only to crumble into piles of their own dust. Christian America would then eventually get around to over-running the waning remnants of Mormonism by sheer force of numbers until the survivors were sufficiently diluted to become politically and socially insignificant—like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Charismatics, and other goofy Christian deviants.
Life did not work according to that plan.
Ten years into what Christian America had imagined would be a hopeless, leaderless, gasping Mormon failure in the desert, quite the reverse was happening. Mormonism was thriving and spreading its culture all across the Intermountain West. Mormonism was converting Europe, proselytizing the cities and farms of Canada and Eastern America. Mormonism was bringing enthusiastic capitalists and cultural diversity by the thousands and tens of thousands into America’s Great Basin. There, Brigham Young was daily transforming these foreigners, American oddballs, dissidents, and former Christians, into productive, patriotic Americans—Americans who rather than look at Mormonism as a threat to the exclusive whims of a Christian Nation, saw their new church, its doctrines and leadership, as the foremost protector of Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness regardless of race, creed, or color.
Christian America couldn’t allow that to go on for very long.
Christian America had spent years inventing legends and rumors of the corrupt, oppressive misbehavior of Brigham Young. An entire class of anti-Mormon literature, newspapers, journals and periodicals, had dedicated itself to the illumination of Brigham Young’s Utah “hell on earth,” and the depravity of his closed, secretive Mormon Empire. Nothing they said or did against the LDS scoundrels however, seemed to prohibit thousands upon thousands of emigrants, Mormon, Gentile, foreign and domestic, from making the exodus out of the teaming crapholes of the Old World and America’s East, and into the fresh, open Mormon territory in the West.
Though quite prepared to believe almost anything said against the puffed-up, conniving Mormon fiend who had appropriated Joe Smith’s bunch of dangerous heretics, for the most part Gentile settlers in the Mormon West found that Brigham Young was not cooperating with the sinister depiction given him by his Eastern critics. No 
concrete examples of his black thuggery seemed to leap immediately forward to prove their point. To the contrary, many noted scholars and Eastern journalists also roamed freely throughout Utah Territory, up and down the streets of Salt Lake City, and most of these expected to be immediately struck by the beastly spectacle of vile conditions and heinous oppression that Mormon detractors had promised them back East. To the contrary, of the general condition of Mormon society, these professional observers conceded, often reluctantly, with suspicion, incredulity, resignation and disappointment dripping from their pens, that as the Great Gary Keillor boasts of his fictional home town of Lake Wobegon, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
In the new Utah Mormon society, Brigham Young in all fairness,
had a pervasive influence over what everyone thought about everything simply because everyone respected his opinions. Once again, this voluntary association and resulting solid Mormon voting block was unassailable in Constitutional terms. The Mormon church may have effectively infiltrated every element of law and civil government, but that was mostly because almost everyone in Utah Territory was a member of it, in the same fashion that Roman 
Catholics seem to “infiltrate” and dominate everything in Italy, or Spain, or Mexico. If Utah courts were stacked with Mormon juries and Mormon officers, it was because the criminals and everyone else there were also nearly all Mormons.
In frustration, in the spring of 1857, a few of Mormonism’s enemies in Utah, ran back to Washington DC making the bold assertion that Brigham Young, Territorial Governor, had usurped all the federal officers appointed by Congress. The cry of treason had never failed them before, and it bore fruit once again in this instance. It was tearfully alleged by a handful of failed federal appointees and contractors, who had made the trip back to Washington to air their complaints, that the Mormons were oppressing and pillaging every “Gentile” in the Territory. And thus, as it had transpired in Nauvoo, where the frantic anti-Mormonists sent their earnest Governor Ford up and down, back and forth around the region with his State Militia, on repeated wild-goose chases, urgently trying to rescue his constituents from phantom Mormon outrages, the newly elected US president, James Buchanan, eagerly assembled a large military force, dubbed it the “Utah Expedition,” and sent it on its way to install a Christian governor into Utah Territory, and put down this pretended Mormon unrest and rebellion.
But this was all according to plan, a plan outlined clearly in writing by Buchanan and agents of his ruling Democrat Party:
The author of the letter which is reproduced herein, Robert Tyler, was a son of John Tyler, tenth president of the United States. The Tyler family’s American roots stretched back to the mid-seventeenth century when its first representatives settled in Virginia. …His career was dominated by the law and his political interests:
…Phila: April 27, 1857
My dear sir:
The public mind is becoming greatly excited on the subject of Mormonism. The Popular Idea is rapidly maturing that Mormonism (already felt slightly in our large Northern cities) should be put down and utterly extirpated.
I believe that we can supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade. Certainly it is a subject which concerns all the Religious Bodies & reaches every man’s fireside with a peculiar interest. Should you, with your accustomed grip, seize this question with a strong fearless & resolute hand, the Country I am sure will rally to you with an earnest enthusiasm & the pipings of Abolitionism will hardly be heard amidst the thunders of the storm we shall raise. Were I President I would put down & cast out this hideous imposture, equally at War with Conscience, Reason & Philosophy, at all hazards. I would take the ground that the case was anomalous & altogether exceptional–without the limits of ordinary Constitutional treatment–& that the principles of the Democratic Party in regard to Territories consequently had no application. The eyes & hearts of the Nation may be made to find so much interest in Utah as to forget Kansas. [Last emphasis mine.]
…
His Excly ever you friend
James Buchanan Ro: Tylerhttp://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
Once again, Christian America boldly spelled out its intention to usurp the Constitution and all the obviously protected rights of the Mormon people. And more to the point, where American Christians were gravely divided on the issue of slavery, these Democrat Party schemers proposed to brazenly make war upon the Latter-day Saints, not because of any threat or specific offense, but simply to unite Christian America in rejoicing over the destruction of Mormonism, and by this means, secure the religious crossover vote for their political party.
In this however, they only echoed the strategy of the Republicans Party’s first appearance in a national election. The Republican platform featured as its chief planks the “eradication of the twin relics of barbarism: slavery and polygamy.”
President Buchanan naturally, never bothered to investigate or confirm any of the allegations brought to him by the likes of Justice WW Drummond. These allegations included petty complaints like this one, posted in the New York Times April 14, 1857, page 2; paragraph 8:
“I charge the Mormons, and Gov. Young in particular, with imprisoning five or six young men from Missouri and Iowa, who are now in the Penitentiary of Utah, without those men having violated any criminal law in America; but they were Anti-Mormons, poor, uneducated young men, on their way for California….”
http://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
Even in his own words it seems hardly worth an invasion, but Drummond bundled his lame litany of personal bitches into a pattern of infamy.
More often than not the complaints of federal judges and law enforcement officers in early Utah Territory came down to not being able to command and manipulate juries and grand juries to convict Mormon desperadoes like Brigham Young, who they had already decreed guilty before leaving Washington, based upon their mighty federal insistence alone. That’s the way federal judges and law enforcement officers worked throughout the American frontier. They were demigods. Federal appointments were usually political rewards, from which the appointee often expected to set up business and political connections through which to graft, bribe, and extort themselves into a sizeable retirement purse. Mormon jurists however, considered the evidence given, and then voted their own minds regardless of federal instructions. Mormon court, civil and political officers did not play the graft game and there were so few “Gentiles” in the system, that though they 
seemed eager to get a piece of the action, there was just too little influence to peddle and too few Gentile collaborators willing to pay for it.
Unremarkable in every other way, WW Drummond was a Christian “reformer” of some stature, and he very dramatically made his “escape” back to Washington to resign his post. He instantly had Washington’s enthusiastic ear. Washington embraced his rant. It was just what the administration and most of Congress needed to move against Brigham Young. With the additional gripes of a few failed civil contractors thrown in for appearances, WW Drummond’s charges would seem completely credible to the American masses. After all, federal officers don’t lie. (And they actually believed that back then…)
The truth however, is that the history of anti-Mormonism is replete with examples of conspiring Saint-bashers inventing frightening but utterly false tales to elicit public outrage whenever they needed to justify their violence. In some cases they even elaborately faked outrages upon themselves in order to have something suitably horrible to blame upon their uncooperatively peaceful Mormon neighbors. As noted by Governor Thomas Ford in his A Brief history of Illinois:
“In the fall of 1845, the anti-Mormons of Lima and Green Plains, held a meeting to devise means for the expulsion of the Mormons from their neighborhood …. The meeting was held, the house was fired at [by their own people], but so as to hurt no one; and the anti-Mormons suddenly breaking up their meeting, rode all over the country spreading the dire alarm, that the Mormons had commenced the work of massacre and death…. On the eleventh of the month twenty-nine houses were burned [by the anti-Mormons.]”
[Laura A. Cruse, American Republicanism as Shown through Mormon-Federal Conflict, 1846-1890, PhD, Northeast Missouri State University, 1994, page 11, note 9, citing B.H. Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965): 346-7)]
http://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
We don’t have to guess the purposes of the Utah Expedition. We have the smoking gun on James Buchanan. We have his version of the “Mob Manifesto” and it follows the same Christian pattern used by the “Regulator” committees in Missouri and Illinois. There was no Mormon rebellion.
Buchanan had promised to destroy the LDS church all through his campaign. One of his closest advisors and Democrat Party-wonk, Robert Tyler, clearly plotted with him to use the military conquest of Mormonism as a wag-the-dog diversion from the burning issue of slavery, and thereby gain both the Southern slaveholder’s vote and the overall religious swing vote on top of it. By this strategy they hoped to insure his re-election and maintain Democrat control of Congress. They include in their scheme, in writing, an open admission that they would have to suspend the Constitution in Utah Territory to do so.
The Utah Expedition was nothing more than religiously driven, politically sanctioned, naked aggression against the Mormon church. So of course, not only did James Buchanan take WW Drummond’s ravings at face value, but he also made no effort at all to inform Brigham Young of these charges, solicit a rebuttal, or seek further explanation from Young or anyone else. He made no indication of his intentions at all to anyone in the Territory of Utah. He had already long decided to kill Mormonism. He was only waiting for a pretense.
Buchanan’s expedition formed itself in the enemy 
hinterlands of former anti-Mormon War regions of the Midwest. As it grew, the Utah Expedition shed all pretense of “investigation,” and soon billed itself openly as an army of extermination and revenge. It took very little time for Brigham Young to hear about these developments through unofficial channels. Buchanan’s total lack of communication notwithstanding, it is then alleged by Christian apologists that Brigham Young responded to the news of his termination and a new governor’s appointment by issuing a “declaration of war,” against the United States:
CITIZENS OF UTAH:
We are invaded by hostile forces, who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction.
For the last twenty-five years we have trusted officials of the government, from Constables and Justices to Judges, Governors and Presidents, only to be scorned, held in derision, insulted and betrayed. Our houses have been plundered and then burned; our fields laid waste, our principal men butchered while under the pledged faith of the Government for their safety, and our families driven from their homes to find that shelter in the barren wilderness, and that protection among hostile savages, which were denied them in the boasted abodes of Christianity and civilization.
The constitution of our common country guarantees unto us all that we do now or ever claimed.
If the constitutional rights, which pertain unto us as American citizens, were extended to Utah, according to the spirit and meaning thereof, and fairly and impartially administered, it is all that we could ask.
Our opponents have availed themselves of prejudices existing against us, because of our religious faith, to send out a formidable host to accomplish our destruction. We have had no privilege, no
opportunity of defending ourselves from the false, foul and unjust aspersions against us before the Nation. The Government has not condescended to cause an investigating committee or other person to be sent to inquire into and ascertain the truth, as is customary in such cases. We know those aspersions to be false, but that avails us nothing. We are condemned unheard, and forced to an issue with an armed mercenary mob, which has been sent against us at the instigation of anonymous letter writers, ashamed to father the base, slanderous falsehoods which they have given to the public; of corrupt officials who have brought false accusations against us, to screen themselves in their own infamy; and of hireling priests and howling editors, who prostitute the truth for filthy lucre’s sake.
The issue which has been thus forced upon us compels us to resort to the great first law of self preservation, and stand in our own defense, a right guaranteed unto us by the genius of the institutions of our country, and upon which the Government is based.
Our duty to our families requires us not to tamely submit to be driven and slain without an attempt to preserve ourselves. Our duty to our country, our holy religion, our God, to freedom and liberty, requires that we should not quietly stand still and see those fetters forging around, which are calculated to enslave and bring us into subjection to an unlawful military despotism, such as can only emanate (in a country of constitutional law) from usurpation, tyranny and oppression.
Therefore, I, Brigham Young, Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory of Utah, in the name of the people or the United States in the Territory of Utah,
First – Forbid all armed forces of every description from coming into this Territory, under any pretense whatever.
Second – That all the forces in said Territory hold themselves in readiness to march at a moment’s notice, to repel any and all such invasion
Third – Martial law is hereby declared to exist in this Territory, from and after the publication of this Proclamation; and no person shall be allowed to pass or repass, into or through, or from this Territory without a permit from the proper officer.
Given under my hand and seal at Great Salt Like City, Territory of Utah, this fifteenth day of September, A.D. eighteen hundred and fifty seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America, the eighty -second.
(Signed) BRIGHAM YOUNG
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/martiallaw.html
In the words of Malcolm X: A man has a right to survive through whatever means necessary. Malcolm said that with an assault rifle in his hands and he’s a “Freedom Fighter.” No so, Brigham Young. Mormonism is still too small a minority for that I suppose.
Buchanan’s so-called Mormon “rebellion,” was just another Christian exercise in the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you declare Mormonism in rebellion. Then you send an army of extermination against them. Then, oddly enough, you find that they rebel from this procedure.
Far from a declaration of war on the United States of America, Brigham Young’s reply to the Utah Expedition only proves once-again that Mormons look upon the Constitution as a Divinely inspired document that guarantees religious and civil liberty to all races, creeds and colors. And yet, the Holy Conspiracy still claims that shortly after publishing this graciously composed, Constitutionally sound, and entirely reasonable statement of territorial defensive policy, Brigham Young decided he’d just pick up the nonexistent telephone, call a few bishops down the three-hundred miles sou
th to Mountain Meadows, and see if his sparse collection of emaciated Mormon lackeys had a spare minute to butcher a randomly selected wagon train full of harmless Christian pilgrims–if any could be found coincidentally camped in the vicinity at that particular moment.
Apparently James Buchanan thought he would just march a large body of artillery and troops out and storm the Salt Lake Valley. I guess he thought it would be that easy. All the way out, this obvious assault force telegraphed its mission at every opportunity to boast of Mormon annihilation. Yet, from the whole of the United States government, there wasn’t any communication of any sort, transmitted in any fashion to the Governor of Utah Territory, explaining the Utah Expedition. All Brigham Young knew, was that it was cursing him and his people all the way from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Bridger, it was armed to the teeth, rolled with heavy artillery, and was swearing the death and destruction of the Mormons. From Brigham Young’s perspective, that pretty much spelled it all out in big block letters.
Brigham Young didn’t need a memo from Washington to explain the Utah Expedition. The Utah Expedition was the memo from Washington. There was very little to misinterpret in that message. The destruction of Mormonism was after all, the key plank in the platform upon which James Buchanan had gotten himself elected.
Brigham Young quickly learned another unsettling bit of information as well: The new governor being inflicted upon them was a man named Alfred Cumming, the same name as one of the most prominent Jackson County Missouri mobocrats. It was also heard that this new governor was from Missouri. Though it turned out that Governor Cumming was a rather nice Christian gentleman from Georgia, and not the Missouri mobber at all, while awaiting the US invasion of Utah, a Mormon campfire song erroneously evolved:
Old Sam has sent I understand
Doo Dah. Doo Dah.
A Missouri ass to rule our land,
Doo Dah, Doo Dah Day…
–Roberts Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pg 396
In the same year of 1857, as the US Army was loading up guns, bombs, and filling out its troops in Kansas, there was also a wagon train making its way past them and on into Mormon country. This was known as the Fancher Party, named for the main family of 
Christian pilgrims it was transporting to California. They passed through Salt Lake City short on supplies, and very quickly became pissed off that the local Mormons weren’t inclined to sell them the provisions they’d been counting on.
The Fanchers are often billed by their admiring, evangelical, anti-Mormon legacy as wealthy farmers. They are lovingly described by their proponents as simple, God-fearing family-types. And so they were—by East Tennessee Regulator-culture standards that is. Even the most “civilized” of them were seasoned pioneers, frontiersmen, and hard-as-nails rugged. The Fancher Party was made up of simple farmers in the same way Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were simple farmers. It was the Fanchers and their kin who fought the battle of the Alamo.
Their trail partners on the other hand, were essentially a border-gang from Missouri who called themselves the “Wildcats.” These were not fun nick-names that some New-Gentrified, farmer-rednecks gave themselves to make their card-club sound daring while they relaxed over a mint-julep and played gin rummy after working their enslaved negroes in the fields all day. These weren’t whimsical Christian plowboys who entertained themselves in the off-season by putting buggies on barn roofs or pranking the Amish by painting their buckboards in bright colors. The Wildcats didn’t just go about the countryside scribbling mean, anti-Abolitionist epithets on outhouse walls. This was a 
self-described, hard-core, seasoned, Missouri band of Regulators, a violent, murdering, brutalizing vigilante squad, well versed in torture, torment, death and destruction. While the Wildcats were heading to California for gold, gambling, whores and fortune, their Missouri brothers were staying behind giving us “Bleeding Kansas,” the brutish, pro-slavery border war that actually delayed the departure of the Utah Expedition just long enough to allow Mormonism to prepare a very successful defense.
Even so-called “neutral” historians have always wondered why these “simple Christian farmers” would fall into the company of cutthroats and ruffians. Honestly, only the latter-day anthropological simpleton could have a problem reconciling this nonexistent conflict of identities. Still, this is a puzzle many historians on both sides have continuously used to prove either this or that point: that the two were entirely separate, disinterested parties only very briefly together out of necessity and security, or that the Fanchers and Bakers and other “family” elements of the train were just as profane and rowdy as the Missourians. Neither is true.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-bleedingkansas3.html
For most purposes, the Fanchers, Bakers, a few other amalgamated families and friends, were indeed a cut well above the Missouri “pukes.” (A regional nick-name at the time.) What seems astoundingly ignorant to me however, as a hack-writer and amateur historian of highly dubious qualifications, is that nobody has ever noticed that these ostensibly disparate groups of people are to the contrary, ethnic brethren. They’re all Scots-Irish, East Tennessee, Protestant, Fundamentalist kinfolk, from the same genetic, religious, ideological and cultural seed. While the Fanchers may have fled the Tennessee hills to find more productive land, a few more manners and a little more prosperity in Arkansas, it has always been the landed-Gentry, the Church-going Fancher types, who have enabled, directed, and validated the violence of the hillbilly Regulator-types. Coarse social elements like the 
Missouri Wildcats have always been groomed and exploited by Christianity’s more refined citizens, to “regulate” their society according to their common desires and prejudices whenever violence is wanted and the hands of the “civil” must not be stained with the blood of infidels. The Wildcats were idiot cousins to the Fanchers perhaps, but cousins just the same—cousins of a common ethnic and religious experience.
And keep in mind also, that as the “good Christian” Fanchers were heading for California, their “good Christian” contemporaries, Abolitionist settlers under John Brown, were in turn, personally hacking up the Fancher’s pro-slave Tennessee brothers in Kansas, and then dressing up in their best Sunday suits for respectable photographs, and sharing the Communion of the Saints like innocent angels. Violence was just a thing “good Christians” did back in the day. Just a thing they still do.
http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/exhibits/john_brown/page2.html
As they made their way through Salt Lake City, down the Wasatch Front and through the lower, distant Mormon settlements, the Fanchers became increasingly more disgruntled at not getting all the supplies they wanted, and paying high prices for anything they did manage to buy off the Mormons. The Bakers, the Fanchers, Wildcats, or whoever–began to shoot their mouths off about the huge army that was boasted to be right on their heels, an army that would soon put the Mormons in their place. It was then that Utah’s Mormon survivors of previous Christian military actions begin to think they recognized some of the mouthy Wildcats as having been part of the mobs and rogue militias who had burned and slaughtered them out of Missouri and Illinois.
In the fall of 1857, after several years of drought and bad crops, Mormons in Utah did not want to sell their scarce provisions to anyone, much less the same smart-mouthed, murdering Missouri bastards who’d driven them into that wilderness. Now, you can say the Fanchers themselves were from Arkansas all you want, but they were the same Appalachian, East Tennessee, Andy Jackson rednecks Mormons knew all too well from previous persecutions. There were 70 men and boys in their company who were imposing riflemen. They were healthy, and strongly built from years of heavy frontier farm work. The Fancher Party had additional older girls and women who could shoot plenty good too. They had at least 11 hard-core “Regulators,” as ruthless and competent a band off semi-professional killers as the American frontier had ever seen. They outgunned and outnumbered every single one of the settlements they passed through in the lowest, hottest, deadest stretches of the Mormon sphere of influence.
With a Born-Again army of invasion on its way, and all communication lines cut by the federal government, the Mormons of southern Utah were in a very conservative frame of mind. Mormonism was hunkering down for an extended fight and expected to be soon cutoff from all supply lines. To them, the Fancher Party did not look like a Sunday School class fellowshipping its way to California. They looked like trouble.
There are of course, pro-Fancher, “sainted hillbilly” versions of this wagon train, where there never were any 
“Wildcats” and the Fanchers are portrayed as a small, unarmed, helplessly naïve Bible-study group. But the fact remains that the very territories they were emigrating from were full of mixed, migrating groups of Ruffian and “good Christian settler” components, and they were indeed shooting the hell out of “Redskins,” Abolitionists and Freestate competitors all over Kansas, Missouri, and “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. They were all Appalachian spin-offs, trying to get their share of the open land and goodies for the cause of slavery and King Cotton. They were a tough crowd. Not only did this ethnic, religious, political, combination of “Fanchers” and “Wildcats” win Texas for slavery, but only a few years later this same lot would beat the mighty Union to a near-defeat in one of the bloodiest Civil Wars in history, with nothing but a few rifles, their fighting skill and sheer bravery.
Utah territorial records clearly expose the myth of the Fancher Party’s oft-touted Christian purity. They are plainly recorded moving through the Salt Lake and Utah Valleys clearly united with the Duke Party. The Dukes were unequivocally boasted to be from Missouri. The Dukes bragged of some 11 self-identified members of a volunteer militia called the “Wildcats.” The “Wildcats” were in fact “regulators” or vigilante mobs that enforced Darwinian-Democracy’s Christian “cultural” mandates through extra-legal violence and murder in period vernacular. If not the mob that killed Joseph Smith, they were of the same type and pedigree. Whether or not they had any direct action against the Missouri or Nauvoo Saints is uncertain. That they inherently hated the Latter-day Saints is not debatable.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-bleedingkansas3.html
The Duke and Fancher parties were repeatedly recorded travelling and negotiating for supplies and camp space together as a combined train. It is often claimed by pro-Fancher “historians” that the Wildcats actually left the slower moving Baker-Fancher train shortly after Salt Lake City. In this scenario, it is therefore contended that the Fanchers and other emigrant families were utterly innocent of any offense that might have precipitated their demise at Mountain Meadows. But then again, the irony of these sorts of pioneering wagon train disasters, is that the hellfire of Native and local vengeance usually falls upon the train immediately following the arse-holes who initiate all the trouble.
Neither the Mormons nor the Indians responsible for their destruction would have had any clear way to distinguish their ideological or physical separation from the Duke Party Wildcats. Frankly, to the Mormons, they were all hillbilly rednecks. They all spoke with the same East Tennessee twang. They all prayed to the same vengeful, anti-Mormon God, and cursed heathen Indians and the Latter-day Saints as their common enemies. To the Indians, they were all “shwop.” Indeed, the local Indians only had two names for white men: shwop, and Mormon. Mormons were their friends. Shwop were their enemies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hysteria_preceding_the_Mountain_Meadows_massacre
While the Fundamentalist legacy of the Fancher Party may be convinced they see the whole matter of Mountain Meadows with crystal clarity, in all honesty, the only thing clearly evident in the surviving jumble of half-facts, bigoted personal opinion, and bold speculation, is that there was a massive culture clash that ensued when the Fancher train passed through southern Utah. This time however, it wasn’t the hillbilly rednecks who had the entire region’s social and governmental establishments bent decidedly in their favor. This time, things did not go their way. This time they could not just beat up, shoot up, or string up the offending Mormons and take what they wanted away from them like they had done for two generations in Missouri and Illinois, or like they were doing in Kansas to the Abolitionists and Freestaters.
Occam’s razor, the once-popular burden-of-proof test states: “Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.” Rather than attempt to empirically validate that theory, I’ll just say that for my money, I think what happened to the Fancher Party at Mountain Meadows in the Fall of 1857, was that this particular wagon load of hillbillies crapped on exactly the wrong group of Mormons at just the wrong time, in absolutely the wrong place.
This narrative is a good summary of the main players and events connected with the Mountain Meadows Massacre:
In August of 1857 a wagon train of immigrants from Arkansas and Missouri known as the Fancher Party began to take the trail through Utah on their way to California. Due to the war preparations in the Utah territory they were unable to purchase many of the provisions they needed and had planned to buy in Salt Lake City. Out of frustration, this train began to lash out at the Saints threatening to take news of the insurrection to California and bring back troops. Additionally, some of the immigrants began to boast that they had participated in the Missouri persecutions (including Haun’s Mill) and some sources indicate that one immigrant claimed to be carrying the gun that killed Joseph Smith.[xvi] As the train moved through Salt Lake City and on to the southern settlements, some immigrants began to steal provisions that they were unable to buy out of sheer desperation. The Fancher party’s frustration combined with the anger, paranoia and thirst for vengeance by the southern Saints created an environment ripe for violence. In speaking of the actions of some of the southern Saints when they became aware of the Fancher party, its claims and activities; Juanita Brooks explains:
Immediately following the regular church service, a special meeting was called of the Stake High Council. Isaac C. Haight, as the highest in religious authority [stake president] and the one in command of the military organization in the town, was in charge of this indignation meeting. The local officers wanted the help of the militia to enforce the law, and various members expressed themselves freely as to what should be done with regard to the emigrant company. Some felt that the travelers should not be allowed to get away with such defiance.
A resolution was presented and passed to the effect that we will deal with this situation now, so that our hands will be free to meet the army when it comes. After it was passed, Laban Morrill and others began to ask questions. What, specifically, did the brethren mean by dealing with the situation now? Arrest and punish the offenders? Some felt that this would do no good; it would only mean men to guard them and food to feed them, and no one any better off.
So, it was suggested that they be done away with. Ever since the days of Missouri and Nauvoo, ever since the martyrdom of their prophet, the Saints had been taught that they should never cease to importune the Lord to avenge the blood of the prophets. Now, here were the men who had boasted openly and defiantly that they had helped to kill Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. One had displayed the pistol which fired the fatal shot. All had laughed to scorn the attempts of the local officers to arrest them. [Because the Fancher train outgunned and outnumbered the whole region.] Should they forget the oaths of vengeance which they had taken and sit back weakly while such as these taunted them? (emphasis added)[xvii]
Entire books have been written in an attempt to explain the events of September 11, 1857.[xviii] For sake of brevity, I will offer only the essential details. A group of Indians[xix] and zealous Mormons led by Isaac Haight and John D. Lee (both leaders of the Church in southern Utah) attacked the Fancher party at Mountain Meadows on or about September 7th. [Actually, Lee was not a bishop as popularly assumed, he was an elder, led a tiny branch in a very small settlement, and was a liaison to the Native Americans as an agricultural advisor.] Apparently, the Fancher party was better-armed than had been expected and withstood the initial assault. The fighting went on for several days but on September 11, a group of Mormon men approached the
party under the pretense of peace offering to escort the group safely to the next settlement on the condition that the immigrants disarm and walk away protected by the company of Mormons. The Fancher party agreed to the request and was marched about one-half mile from their wagons when a signal was given by Mormon leaders and all members of the immigrant party, with the exception of those children who were not yet old enough to speak, were summarily shot and killed.
Just for the record, the bold emphasis above is mine. I wanted to clearly note that the text actually deals with the Brethren urging the Saints to pray to the Lord to do all the avenging. The actual Mormon canon on the subject of raining death upon your fellow man is:
18 And now, behold, I speak unto the church. Thou shalt not akill; and he that bkills shall cnot have forgiveness in this world, nor in the world to come.
79 And it shall come to pass, that if any persons among you shallakill they shall be delivered up and dealt with according to the laws of the land; for remember that he hath no forgiveness; and it shall be proved according to the laws of the land.
–D&C Section 42, 9 February 1831
According to most accounts, the Fancher Train also seems to have pissed off just the wrong group of Indians,
at just the wrong time, at just the wrong place. We can argue ignorantly and inconclusively forever, who provoked or nudged the Indians into open attack, the Fancher crew themselves or diabolical Mormon instigators. Again, my money’s on the simple explanation: the Fanchers pissed off both the Indians and the Mormons. The Indians wanted to go to war, the Mormons said, go ahead, knock yourselves out–we don’t like them anyway and we have bigger fish to fry. When the Fanchers proved tougher than expected, the Indians joyfully invited the local Mormons to help them actively and personally in the war party.
http://historyofmormonism.com/mormon-history/utah_war_period/
http://mountainmeadowsmassacre.com/
http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/meadows2.htm
Assuming all of this, we’re still short of any half-intelligent motivation for the particularly cold-blooded strategy executed so efficiently by the Mormons to conclude the hostilities at Mountain Meadows. It can be deduced that the Mormons sought to overcome the superior position and fighting instincts of the wild and wooly Fancher gang, who had by then thoroughly dug in, out-smarted and outshot the Indians. But the most logical explanation for the Mormon decision to go beyond simple defeat to total extermination however, seems to be that there was a daring nighttime escape by two brave souls of the Fancher Party during the initial Indian-only part of the siege on Wednesday, 10 September. These escapees encountered three unidentified white men near the Mormon settlement of Pinto, who they approached for assistance. Instead of finding help, they were shot at, and one of the Fancher crew was killed on the spot. The second fled, slipped back, re-entered the Fancher stronghold, and eventually perished with the rest of his companions.
By Thursday, 11 September, a rally call from John Lee had gathered ‘round him as many as fifty or sixty Mormon combatants, most of whom were very young men and older boys. It is often claimed that Lee used the Mormon “militia” against the Fanchers, again anachronistically assuming that the Fanchers were helpless weaklings facing a large Mormon military assault. Quite untrue. Alone, Lee’s meager, unproven force was not sufficient to overcome the Fancher’s entrenched position and experienced riflemen. The Indians, no strangers to warfare, hadn’t been doing so well even with their greater numbers. The night before and again that morning, Lee’s party debated what to do about the situation. While in these deliberations, and while still waiting for direct word from the courier sent to get instructions from Brigham Young, this troubled Mormon war party heard the story of the Pinto shooting.
Now, according to the Mormon attackers–the only surviving witnesses to these events–up until they heard the Pinto news, the affair at Mountain Meadows had been an Indian attack. Lee and crew had been reluctantly entangled in the operation as advisors. It was clear that most of them still had deep reservations about getting directly involved in the whole mess. However, the business of hostile whites shooting at escaping members of the Fancher’s crew, now clearly incriminated the Mormons. That changed the tenor of the Mormon deliberations. At that point, it was thought that allowing any of the Fancher Party to live and retell that story in California would bring federal troops from the south who would fall upon their indefensible southern settlements within a week or two. Also, their Indian brothers were becoming more and more offended at the Mormon reluctance to help the war party out.
The thing you have to understand about the Missouri Wildcats and the Mormon claims that they were conjuring up threats of militant boogey men, is that the Mormons 
knew that the boogey man really did exist. They had seen him often. He really did come and take your supplies by force if he wanted them and leave you unarmed and starving. He did burn you out of your house, and he did rape your women, kill your friends and children, and hack people into bits. More to the point: The boogey man who routinely came upon the Mormons to take their stuff by force, raining leaden hellfire, almost always had an East Tennessee accent, called himself a “simple country farmer,” claimed to be a “God-fearing Christian,” and had friends who formed gangs they titled with heroic names like “Wildcats,” and “Regulators.” The Mormons also knew that when you called for help from state and federal troops, most of the time they showed up with the same hick accents, were members of the same secret vigilance clubs, and rather than rescue you, they helped the boogeyman destroy everyone and everything you ever loved.
Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church V 4, pg 153, 372
http://www.yorgalily.org/~yorgasor/church/ComprehensiveHistoryOfTheChurch/hc4.html
Pro-Fanchers often deny it, but a fair part of this nightmare is firmly rooted in the fact that at least some number in that ill fated company took great pleasure in openly baiting the local Mormons:
…When passing through Provo, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, the emigrants decided to stop and let their animals rest. An area just west of the town had been marked off, by the local settlers, as use for animal feed during the upcoming winter. The emigrants allowed their livestock to wander into this area, and after seeing this the local settlers asked the party to move on to another area a few miles to the west; even offering to help them move.[3] One of the party’s leaders refused saying “This is Uncle Sam’s grass…We are staying right here.”, so the settlers gave them the option of fighting or leaving; the party left.[3] After camping the night, the Baker-Fancher party continued to pass through Utah over the next few weeks, arriving near Cedar City on Thursday, September 3, 1857.[4]
Cedar City was the last major settlement where emigrants could stop to buy grain and supplies b
efore a long stretch of wilderness leading to California.[5] When the Baker-Fancher train arrived there, however, they were turned a cold shoulder once again; important goods were not available in the town store, and the local miller charged an exorbitant price for grinding grain.[5] As tension between the Mormons and the emigrants mounted, a member of the Baker-Fancher train was said to have bragged how he had the very gun that “shot the guts out of Old Joe Smith“.[6] Other members of the party reportedly bragged about taking part in the Haun’s Mill massacre some decades before in Missouri.[5] Others were reported by Mormons to have threatened to join the incoming federal troops, or join troops from California, and march against the Mormons….[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_and_siege_of_the_Mountain_Meadows_massacre
If we are to deny the Mormon claims of these continued provocations, the mystery here, is that the Fancher Party would not have been singled out of a whole season of wagon trains simply because Mormons and Indians just naturally hated good, peaceful Christians. The “Virginal Fancher” apologists can only keep insisting that Brigham Young ordered their execution because he’s evil. They can’t however, come up with a logical reason for ordering this particular action against this particular wagon train at this particular time.
As for the Native Americans, well, Christian America has been billing them as mindless, murdering savages 
from the days of Jamestown onward. The Indian part of the story isn’t hard for Christian America to pass off as commonplace barbarity even if they want to claim the Mormons recruited them to do the dastardly deed. Oddly enough, the Fancher apologists sometimes go so far as to claim fantastically, that there wasn’t a single Indian involved at Mountain Meadows, it was all Mormon, from start to finish, conception to completion.
Apart from the fact that the Fancher apologists so desperately want to portray their Christian martyrs as even saintlier than the Saints, the story of their battle with the Indians and their Mormon accomplices—or vice-versa–is fairly heroic. According to their assassins, they shot like professionals and could have held off the attack for as long as they had ammunition.
The Fancher Party had sunk their wagons up to the axles and chained them in a circle. In this strong defensive posture. The Indians who engaged them initially, made little progress and took high losses. The Mormon conspirators estimated that their combined Indian and Mormon forces would still take weeks to finish them off, and then again, only with high losses. The Fancher Party, whoever they were, whatever else they were, constituted a very serious force to be reckoned with in the deserted wilds of southern 
Utah Territory. If the Fancher Party had decided to come into town and take their provisions from the Mormons by force, they could have done just that.
Was this a likely eventuality? Yes. For all they knew, they were indefinitely stuck with waning provisions, in a desert hellhole, impatiently waiting for word to come back from Salt Lake City, so the local Mormon authorities could decide whether they should let them pass through or not. And if not, then what? But the Fancher faithful are no different than the Mormon apologists in this regard–the Fanchers can’t just be examined as normal human beings, they have to be adored as sainted, Christ-like aberrations you’d never encounter in real life anywhere, much less within a hearty, frontier, rednecked, hillbilly-pioneering tradition.
The Fanchers probably had no great fear of the pitiful Yankee Mormon locals. They knew from long reputation that Latter-day Saints never went to fighting unless it was the absolute last resort. And then only after weeks of leadership meetings followed by public assemblies, a lot of voting, speeches, counseling, and handwringing. The Missouri asses the Fanchers joined up with certainly would never have worried about being discrete in their utterations. The Missouri mob-militias hadn’t been afraid to take on the well-armed Mormon “Danites” who banded against them at Gallatin and Far West. They showed no fear of the huge, well-outfitted Nauvoo Legion, or the Illinois State Militia Regulars who defended the Mormons at the fall of Nauvoo. They had a long history of undertaking open warfare against the Saints with childish glee, as if the bigger the battle, the better the sport.
It appears indeed, that the Wildcat faction of the Fancher Party actually kept increasing its provocative rhetoric as their train grew more and more distant from the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City. While the Wildcats were amplifying and perfecting their taunts, it was also becoming widely known that the Fanchers were from Arkansas and the local Saints had recently learned that their beloved Mormon apostle and charismatic missionary, Parley P Pratt, had been stabbed to death back there in the Fancher’s home state by a jealous “good Christian” husband who said he was afraid Pratt was trying to convert his wife so he could help her run off to Utah with his kids. And then the southern Utah Saints learned Brigham Young had declared martial law, just about the time the Wildcats were bragging about shooting Joe Smith’s guts out.
Even “neutral” historians today still leave you with the impression that the Fanchers were a tiny handful of starving Christian pilgrims, humbled by the surrounding Mormon military might. That’s not however, what our infamously anti-Mormon Judge John Cradlebaugh argued in his report to president Buchanan:
…I have lately visited the southern settlement of this Territory, particularly the place where 119 emigrants were massacred, at the Mountain Meadows on the 10th of September, 1857. Eighty or more white men were engaged in that affair. Warrants are now in the hands of the Marshal for forty of them. The entire population within 150 miles of the Meadows does not exceed 1,100 — with not more than 200 of an adult male population.
Cradlebaugh’s estimate is actually an argument for giving him a federal marshal and a few troops and he could easily thrash the hell out of his whole southern district until he got to the bottom of it all. This also concurs with John Lee’s claim that all he could muster was his handful of local church leaders and some fifty or sixty older boys to make up his allegedly fierce “militia.”
Mountain Meadows is not Nauvoo, it isn’t even anywhere near Salt Lake City. St. George and Cedar City, the two largest settlements closest to Mountain Meadows, were rough villages at the time. (Some say still are…) The Fanchers were already nearly ready to fight in Provo, and the handful of old farts and youngsters that John D Lee barely managed to scrape together some 250 miles south of there in the desert, was not the Nauvoo Legion. It was the Fancher Party that represented a concentration of frontier hardiness and aggression as it passed through southern Utah, not the local Mormons. The Fancher Party, with or without any Missouri Wildcats, could have easily taken any Mormon town in 
southern Utah at the time without breaking a sweat. Any two or three of them.
Today, you have all the leisure and resources to casually research this little group of emigrants from “Arkansas.” John D Lee and Isaac Haight had neither, squatting around a council fire, with an army of extermination on the way and a bunch of Indians nagging at them in the wilds of southern Utah. Perception is reality. The last experience these isolated and utterly exposed Mormons had with the likes of the Fanchers and probably the Wildcats themselves, in Missouri and Illinois, was twice-attempted genocide. In Missouri, it remained legal by standing executive order to shoot Mormons on sight until 1976.
http://bransonmissouri.missourinetizen.com/2008/09/mormon-massacre-and-apology.html
To the Mormons on the lowest fringe of Utah Territory in 1857, living under threat of federal invasion and extermination in the undefendable southern extreme of the Mormon dominion, the Fancher Party was perceived to be the boogeyman. A large, belligerent, smart-assed, well-armed boogeyman.
On 11 September, 1857, on the Mountain Meadows of southern Utah, a small group of panicked, pissed-off and disoriented local Mormons killed the boogeyman. That’s what Mountain Meadows is all about.
Why is this so hard to believe?
Mormon Wars Part 4: Politics, the Other Religion
Loyal Latter-day Saints keep telling themselves that plural marriage was withdrawn from them by the Lord in order to save the church. Mormons today however, euphemize, obfuscate and blur the real Christianized, federal tyranny of that situation however. The whole truth is, the Utah State constitution specifically outlaws plural marriage. It was a condition for statehood dictated by Congress. Quite in spite of this enlightened century’s new, brown, black, red, yellow and tan little Mormons in distant countries in which plural marriage is the social and legal norm, the lily-white, American Mormon church leadership is still parked long-term in Utah, and cannot condone or author any statement along the lines that plural marriage–the patriarchal order–is a valid, Biblical concept. This is so even if they do not permit its institution in the church as a practice, not even in countries abroad where it may 
be entirely legal and socially dominant. This puts the Mormon church in the ironic and dogmatically awkward position of being the only “Christian” missionary effort in the Muslim or developing, animist/polygamist worlds that wholeheartedly agrees with them on the principle of plural marriage, yet must instead tell potential converts that they cannot join the church because they have more than one wife. The American punishment for advocating any such Biblical correctness under US state and federal laws, is the dissolution of the LDS corporate charter, and the confiscation of every lick of money and property the LDS church owns in the state of Utah. That’s for openers. The LDS church is literally held hostage by the federal government even today.
The federal government directly owns or controls some 80-90% of the state of Utah to this day. Salt Lake County, its most populated area, has struggled to maintain a majority Mormon representation since the mid-1980’s, and Salt Lake City itself has an even lower percentage of active, genuine Mormons in it. The concept of a Utah “Mormon” rebellion or secession from the United States of America, is rather unlikely–even if the Mormon hierarchy actually ever wanted that. Though federal intrusion into territorial and then state political matters began as a crusade against Mormonism, it remains however, the nature of the federal government, that once it takes some portion of your rights or property, it never gives it back. Once the federal government sets a precedent of subverting Constitutional rights in one area, in one circumstance, with one set of people, it relentlessly wedges itself through that little crack in the nation’s protective door of Constitutionalized rights and liberties, until it is forced open wide and the feds rush in to take all the loot, all the booze, all the women, and all the fun. (Figuratively, and literally.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_the_late_19th_century
http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geog/rrt/part3/chp6/48.htm
Mormonism had to choose between statehood, or taking a daily beating while slowly being choked to death. The Mormons had to decide between defending the Biblical practice of plural marriage, sustaining the way of all the Biblical patriarchs, or achieving some measure of national acceptance and a long-term truce with the Christian Nation. Mormonism chose statehood, the truce, and some level of American toleration. In effect, any 
time LDS authorities are forced by clear Biblical scripture to teach that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, all the great Biblical prophets, took multiple wives and did so with God’s blessing, it could be considered a crime against the United States of America. For more biting irony, in today’s world, there are at present, a score and better of these selfsame United States who have authorized the wedding of avowed and practicing sodomites, or even surgically-altered, pseudo-sodomites. I don’t want to burst anyone’s delusional Bible bubble, but sodomy is indeed specifically banned as an affront to God in the Bible. God hadn’t apparently even considered the transgendered issue, though it would be safe to assume it’s implied under the same clause. I’m not saying stone them all. I’m just saying that plural marriage on the other hand, is clearly Biblically sanctioned, expressly ordained specifically and repeatedly by God, and practiced by the greatest Biblical prophets.
Sodomy, and sodomic marriage is legal. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses would all go to prison for life, their property would be confiscated and their funds would be seized. I’m not judging. I’m just sayin’…
Admittedly, “polygamy” is but one principle, one little device, a gimmick, that Christianity rigged against the Mormons as a constant and ongoing reminder of who really is the master of American religion. It’s not a big enough hindrance to destroy the Mormon church as an institution, but it causes enough pain to tame the heretical Mormon hordes and let them know who’s in charge. Mormonism has had to go-along to get-along on that one issue. They had it crammed down their throats and were forced to swallow it. That’s how federalized, nationalized Christianity “got” Mormonism. That’s how they stuck it to Joe Smith’s rabble in the end. But outlawing plural marriage is not really the point of anti-Mormon legislation or LDS persecution in the first place. It wasn’t even a factor from the first persecutions connected to Joseph Smith’s “First Vision,” his production of the Book of Mormon, and well into Smith’s assassination at Carthage. Barely an inkling of the plural marriage issue had been leaked to the public at the time of Smith’s murder. Indeed, that first dribble of a leak was the whole point of destroying the Nauvoo Expositor. But the Expositor and plural marriage wasn’t the reason Joseph Smith was killed, and it wasn’t the real reason the United States of America eventually sent an Army out to Utah to get Mormonism under federal control. No, the reason for Christian America’s systematic enabling of Mormon persecution was the Mormon voting block.
Vol. V Springfield, Friday, November 13, 1840. No. 37.
WHIG VERACITY.
The Missouri Republican and Quincy Whig both assert that the Hon. Richard M. Young and Stephen A. Douglass, Esq., were at Nauvoo, in Hancock county, on the day of the election, and it is insinuated by these Federal prints that they “induced two hundred Mormon voters to erase the name of A. Lincoln from the Whig electoral ticket, and substitute the name of James H. Ralston in its stead.” Now, for part of the above, every citizen of Springfield, can answer for its falsity. Mr. Douglass was in this place on the day of the election near the polls all day.
The Quincy Whig speaks of the erasure of Mr. Lincoln’s name as “a trick played upon “two hundred Mormon voters.” We do not view it in this light. It is very certain that Mr. Lincoln runs near 200 votes behind his ticket in Hancock county, and it is equally as certain that Judge Ralston runs near 200 ahead of his ticket, but this the voters had a perfect right to do. The “Mormon voters,” as well as all other voters have the right to vote for whomsoever they please, and no editor has the right to insinuate that any voter is governed by improper motives, or has been “tricked.” as this Whig editor calls it….
Now, the dynamics of these initial courtships between Gentile politicians and the Mormon vote were such that the winners immediately realized the Mormons voted as a block, and winning this block would determine the 
whole election. Soon, the losers realized that only by turning the entire populace against the Mormons on any and all levels possible would neutralize this phenomenon. This was done by Satanizing, villainizing, and conspiricizing them, first along religious grounds, and then more broadly, along the lines of a threat to personal “freedoms.” Each target constituency was preached a cleverly customized threat message: the pious were told that Mormons would persecute and soon destroy your favorite local churches. The rowdy were cautioned that Mormons would not let you drink on Sunday or ride through town shooting your guns in the air, and planned to close all the whore houses and saloons. Whatever precious “freedom” you feared losing most, that was what the Mormons were billed as trying to take from you. It didn’t matter if on the one hand, Mormonism was alleged to stifle the practice of your favorite vice, or on the other, represented a looming imposition upon your personal virtue. The ploy was personalized for each special interest group, and worked across the whole social, political, and ideological spectrum.
Mitt Romney, at this writing, a current leading Republican presidential candidate, is on the receiving end of heaps of old-style anti-Mormon rhetoric. Essentially, the Tea Party/Religious Right types still seem to prefer anyone but a Mormon, even though Romney consistently polls as the only Republican candidate capable of decidedly beating his incumbent opponent, their hated, Godless Commie, and possible closet Muslim, president Barack Hussein Obama. Romney’s first go at a 
presidential candidacy in the last election found his Republican primary opponents rallying the Religious Right against him as a possible anti-Christ. Late in the game when it became clear that Republican, Born-Again, fellow-challenger, Mike Huckabee, was falling off the charts, rather than cut a deal with his third-place standing and adding his gravitas to the strong, second-running Romney for a VP shot on Romney’s ticket, the ordained minister, pastor Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and direct legacy of the original Mormon-hating Tennessee hillbilly rednecks, basically told Mitt to feck his smiley Mormon arse off. The reason for this should be obvious to both the Christian and the Mormon observer if you’ve been paying any attention to my ramblings thus far. The vast majority of Mike Huckabee’s church or political constituency, the two of which are one and the same, devoutly believe Mitt Romney is a cultist who worships the devil. They don’t want a cultist in the White House. Sanctioning a Mormon attempt at taking over a Christian America in any capacity would be the kiss of death for our hip and happenin’ Pastor Mike. Even dealing with a Mitt Romney as VP candidate on a Huckabee ticket would only convince Huckabee’s hillbilly faithful that the Mormons plan to snuff Pastor Pastor Mikey right after the election and put Mitt in the Oval Office by force of violence.
Rather than taking a Romney/Huckabee team to the Republican National Convention that almost certainly would have won the nomination, Mike Huckabee took a talk-show gig with Fox News instead, where he could hobnob with his 
important Christian guests, hang out with famous country music singers, and impose his bass guitar upon a litany of motel-lounge-level pickup bands. This consolidated the front-running Republican ticket into the team of John McCain, doddering old RhINO, and an unelectable, but busty, Born-Again Sarah Palin. The McCain/Palin team decidedly lost the contest for the Republican Party in the general election.
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2226.cfm
While Mitt Romney takes crap from the Left about his smarmy Mormon ways and insipid personal purity, the Right denounces Mitt Romney as a “progressive” and a “liberal.” This sort of flies in the face of the Right’s other claims that he’s part of a creeping Mormon fascism plotting to take over the nation and subjugate all of its Christians, but it works for them. Mitt’s father before him, George Romney, in spite of a good start, a good reputation, tremendous popularity during his long run as governor of Michigan, and a well-funded organization, was wiped right out of his 1968 attempt at the presidency, for similar reasons.
In Mitt’s father’s case, the LDS leadership seemed as critical of his politics as did the Religious Right. The hawks in and out of his own church beat him up severely for claiming the Viet Nam war was unnecessary and the product of “brainwashing” by the military-industrial complex, intimating that the “domino theory” was essentially a vanity of the Right Wing power structure. George Romney was square into the Civil Rights Movement on top of this, which gained him derision again from the Southern rednecks and Northern “Conservatives,” who still make up a large part of the Republican base. George Romney also took a slap in the face and a warning from apostle Delbert L Stapley to shut up about advancing the cause of the negroes, else the Lord might strike him down. Still, throughout his political career, particularly as a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, a state with 700,000 negroes in it, his opponents spread the rumor that Mormons believed God had declared negroes to be second-class citizens, doomed to be eternal servants—a tactic remarkably effective on a national and even state level given his open disagreement with LDS leadership on the subject and his fervent pro-civil rights activities. He was also constantly jabbed by the young and the hip, for talking and thinking like a preacher.
Romney’s campaign did often focus on his core beliefs; a Romney billboard in New Hampshire read “The Way To Stop Crime Is To Stop Moral Decay”.[129][140] Dartmouth College students gave a bemused reaction to his morals message, displaying signs such as “God Is Alive and Thinks He’s George Romney”.[131]
While George was far less beaten up by his detractors on purely Mormon terms than his son Mitt is today, the whole Mormon issue so complicated George’s national aspirations that even with the most successful run as governor in the history of the state of Michigan, he was out of the Republican presidential contest bef
ore it began in earnest. George Romney was also a victim of the Cleon Skousenite, Red-baiting, McCarthy-era, Right Wing, takeover of LDS culture in the late 50’s and 1960’s. George Romney was almost singular in his distain for the period’s Birch invasion, which formed an LDS Bircher aristocracy that took over both the church and the Republican Party. (Anyone who told Klingon Skousen and ignorant Utah hicks like Delbert Stapley where to stuff their theories is OK by me.) While it is often contended that his religion had nothing to do with George Romney’s failure to win the Republican presidential nomination, the fact of the matter is, the Right Wing of his own Republican party was so busy slapping him around for his enlightened social views that they never got down to openly castigating any of his specifically religious views.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSdSiBehQpI
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/24/delbert_stapley.pdf
https://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/11.3Lythgoe1968-74701cc5-b48e-4116-bf7b-8a43e674056f.pdf
Even though the present Republican sentiment from the Right is, “anyone but Mitt,” despite the favorable polls and a smooth running campaign that has escaped the
bumbling, scandal-ridden, mouth-flapping, miss-stepping of his fellows in the primary race so far, Mitt Romney could have it far worse. Reed Smoot, the first Mormon senator from Utah State, even after a landslide election, went through years of grilling by Congressional committees, refusing to sustain his election and grant him a seat, though he was allowed to be seated silently, during the debates, and eventually won a sustaining vote from Congress. BH Roberts, noted LDS historian, some years previously, was elected to the House of Representatives, and in his case, he was never allowed to be seated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Smoot_hearings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Roberts
It would be insightful to recall that it wasn’t until 1960, with the election of an incredibly likeable and popular John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a war-hero, and American son of a beloved bootlegger, so respected and just plain 
adored by the general population, that the nation’s Protestant bias against Roman Catholics was finally overcome enough to elect a Papist to the presidency.
True, the sort of quibbling hassle the Christian Nation gives Mitt Romney, or even a Jon Huntsman or Harry Reid today, is nothing like the severe persecution of the old days. However, many of modern Christian excuse-makers use phraseology like, “The myth of Persecuted Mormon Innocence,” to mitigate their forefathers’ persecution of the early Latter-day Saints, by suggesting that first, Mormons don’t get persecuted any more, and second, that back when Latter-day Saints were the 
subjects of persecution, they brought it on themselves.
Mormon “Persecution Deniers” first, in reverse order that is, cite a litany of verifiable Mormon retaliations, cleverly omitting the Christian initiatory brutality that almost invariably prompted them. It allows the anti-Mormonist the pretense of honesty. It leaves their rapt Christian audience shivering over their apparently true tales of brutal, but inexplicable Mormon “atrocities.” It’s easy enough to omit the part where the Christians start the fight, and cut to the part where Mormons finish it as they attempt to liberate themselves from Christian oppression. Of course, in that order, it looks like the Mormons are the oppressors and instigators. Moreover, it looks like Mormons just enjoy heaping violence upon good Christians entirely out of the blue. This must be because they’re evil, the gullible Christian audience will conclude. No other explanation seems possible. Thus, these one-sided fables easily seem to prove that Mormons are the very sort of conquering devils they have been promised to be, and are simply out to kill Christians and take all their stuff.
Nauvoo and the Myth of Mormonism’s Persecuted Innocence | Roger Launius’s Blog
http://www.equip.org/articles/the-martyrdom-of-joseph-smith
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/martyr_joseph.htm
http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/jsmartyr.pdf
Even the most honest and “enlightened” of the Christian apologists can’t resist trying to sugar-coat Christian aggression against the early Mormons by pointing out that Jesus would never get pissed off and start a regional war over defending his right to vote like the Mormons did. Jesus, they say, wouldn’t have shot back like Joe Smith did when the mobbers came to butcher Him. As these folks keep pointing out however, Joe Smith is not Jesus Christ. But as I often reply, he doesn’t have to be. The point of my analysis here is that the issue of just who is or isn’t a “true follower of Jesus” is irrelevant. Mormons were, and are, American citizens with Constitutional rights.
Christian aggressors also try to euphemize their instigation of violence against the early Mormons by alluding to vague “mobs,” and writing them off as some far-removed, backslidden, coincidental movement of the offended general population that religious leaders of the day only very reluctantly found associating with their goal to destroy Mormonism. These uncontrollable, inherently violent social cliques they say, are the non-religious portion of “Christian” society, spontaneously responding to Mormon despotism in their own ignorant fashion. Yet, virtually every single mobber to ever attack the Mormons had his name scribbled in the family Bible at birth, had been born and raised a “Christian,” and actual Christian ministers led them in deadly attacks against usually helpless Mormons–even in the regular and volunteer state militias. That’s like Pontius Pilate riding into the garden of Gethsemane with a cohort of troops, sword drawn, hacking his way up to Jesus shouting, “Kill the blasphemer! Death to the heretic!” and when his surrounding followers chop the Savior to pieces in direct obedience to this demand, then, Pilate asks for a bowl of water to wash his hands of the whole 
business.
The presupposition that American citizens have to present a valid Christian passport before being allowed to enter a polling place is the product of an inherent Christian bigotry and disloyalty to Constitutional, Republican government. This notion has little dissipated in American Christian circles to this day. How can it? It is an assumption that constitutes a central and intrinsic part of their religion. Even in the two most recent “Mormon” presidential campaigns, king-makers from the Religious right and candidates pandering to them, have openly stated that America is a Christian nation, and it should have a Christian president at its head. Only a Christian can properly govern a Christian nation they have openly argued, and God has ordained the office of the president be occupied by a disciple of Christ.
Even more mind boggling than the modern Christian’s continued ignorance of Constitutional principles, is the conspiratorial Christian brushoff of Joseph Smith’s execution by a Christian, clergy-sanctioned mob. Christian apologists continue to suggest that unpopular religions, like Mormons, Moonies, Hindus, Muslims, other non-Christians and heretics, have no expectation of due process in a Constitutionally Christian legal and political system. It is quite natural for the general population to rise up and kill you if you’re not flying the right gospel flag they maintain. This is your fault for not properly confining your belief system to Christian orthodoxy. What else did you expect? they pose, as they excuse the violence of their Christian ancestors—against Mormons or Indians or any of the traditional Christian “threats’ to Godly rule. Christians who confess their part in the assassination of Joseph Smith at all, do so as if it all evened-out since Smith was arrogant enough to arm himself. He knew he had it coming—he even had the gall to shoot back at the lynch mob his Christian neighbors had rallied up and mustered together to do him in. It just proves what a faker he was. Modern Christianity, with a straight face and sober resolve, openly portrays Joseph Smith’s attempt to defend himself against a mob of Christian killers as a vain and petty act of selfishness, or even a vainglorious rebellion against Christian justice.
Naturally, nobody describes Joseph Smith’s assassins as “Christians.” Mormons don’t, because they still think
they are Christians, and that would only tarnish the name. Well, the name has been well-tarnished for two-thousand and more years so far: what’s a little more tarnish going to hurt? Christians weasel out of the mob’s thirst for Mormon blood and gore by declaring that the “mobs” obviously couldn’t be “Christians” because Christians don’t act like that. Well, sorry, but that’s exactly how they do act. Frequently. Repeatedly. Perpetually.
While everyone on all sides thinks it would be better to move along and get along, I wonder who they all think killed Joseph Smith then? Was it the large Muslim population of the American Midwest of the 19th century that rose up to stifle his religious rights? Was it the rabbis of the Northeast that screamed for Mormonism’s death from synagogue to synagogue? Was it the three Hindus and the couple of hundred Buddhists in the region that were behind all this murder and destruction?
No, it was the Christians.
Mormons as a people, have never been pacifists. We should all get that straight. That’s never been a tenet of the religion. A Mormon will take a bullet in the head for Jesus if it comes down to it, but all things being equal, a Mormon will earnestly try to dodge that bullet, and put one in the head of the guy shooting at them instead. Mormons figure, it’s really the guy starting the fight that Jesus would want taken out of this world.
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_s_patton_2.html#ixzz1df4cOHmd
Christian apologists who make the “myth of innocence” argument are essentially saying that Christians should be able to poke Mormons in the eye with a sharp stick at will, and if the Mormons don’t cheerfully offer a clear 
shot of the other one in response, it proves they’re frauds. I’m sure that makes sense to a Christian, since Christians have been poking out the eyes of heretics and accused sinners for millennia with impunity. They believe it’s their God-given right.
I shouldn’t need to refresh us all on the several Crusades, on Cromwell, on the Highland purges, on the Emperor Constantine’s vision of a crucifix glowing in the sky, and the words that came to him, “in this sign conquer,” after which he subjected most of the known world to his own personally defined and enforced “Christianity.” If you want to understand atrocities by Mormons upon Christians, you can’t pick the narrative up 1857 years into the story. You can’t automatically assume the Christians are the heroes of the tale, as you have been trained since a toddler in Sunday School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_hoc_signo_vinces
Christians were a despised and persecuted minority for their first three centuries. Christians were blamed for 
burning Rome and the same sort of general disloyalty Mormons, Jews, and other persecuted religious minorities have been labeled with for ages. Mormons by contrast are barely two centuries into that progression, but it’s not the Pagans in charge of the government this time around, it’s the Christians. And for a Christian, payback is a bitch. Christian payback is in fact, an almost two-thousand-year-old tradition, handed down from father to son to son to son to son….
In its short history on this planet, Mormonism has a handful of angry frontier dustups to apologize for. This much is undeniable. So I’ll just do my apologizing at now, on behalf of all Mormanity: Sorry.
Christian America broke its toe kicking Mormonism’s arse for almost two-hundred years. The Mormons put up a good fight, but in the end they got slapped silly and cried “uncle.” That’s essentially what the record shows. Go ahead. Blame your broken toe on the Mormons. Times were hard. Mormon arses were harder. And you started it. Now, you guys, Christianity, how about apologizing for your 2011 years of wholesale genocide all around the globe? No? Not willing to make that moral comparison? Sound a little too morally un-equivalent for you?
I refer you to: http://bible.cc/matthew/7-3.htm, a little advice from our beloved Matthew about a mote and a beam.
The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor by Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo city council was clearly the legal match that lit up the Illinois Mormon war in 1844. Of this action, Illinois Governor Thomas Ford, advised Smith that they would have been better off organizing a mob (the same sort of mob that killed Smith shortly afterward) and effect his purpose of silencing the newspaper in that fashion, rather than by putting the color of the law onto it. Frankly, that’s the way you got things done in the frontier at the time. You fought it out. You came to blows if necessary. If that didn’t work you shot it out.
America is fine with hero-worshipping the poor frontier settler against the railroad barons, the cattle barons, the oil barons, who stole their land, murdered, oppressed, and drove them out. The theater crowd rises to its feet and applauds when the little band of immigrants rises up and defends itself against the big bosses, their hired gunslingers and thugs. Put Joe Smith and a small settlement of Mormons in the hero’s role, and suddenly the movie isn’t so popular.
Public opinion is easily swayed, and today’s notion of a biased press has nothing on the outright advocacy press that prevailed in Joseph Smith’s day. Mormon attempts to mail reports and journals outside their own immediate areas of control were systematically put down by universal loss or destruction of their mailings, and then when carted personally to outlying regions and distributed, Mormon newspapers and other documents were utterly destroyed by gangs of persecutors who followed 
minutes behind their distribution efforts. The mob not only did the dirty deeds, but it controlled how the story was told about those deeds.
Reports, records, commentaries on the various Mormon wars and persecutions are not scarce or difficult to obtain today however. Just Google it, as my kids say. 
Unfortunately, Mormon historical records are just so contradictory as to be unhelpful to the naïve and uninitiated. You can pick and choose which you care to believe and make Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or the whole church glow in whatever color light suits your prejudices. And the truth be known, BH Robert’s LDS authorized Comprehensive History of the Church, and The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, do a far better job of factually recording the arguments on all sides than the anti-Mormon efforts, or even allegedly neutral scholars like Fawn Brody, in her No Man Knows My History. But Slogging through Roberts is hard work—lots of footnotes. Lots of actual statements from actual people with actual names, dates, times, witnesses. Actual quotes from actual first-hand notes, letters, publications. Lots of follow-up. Lots and lots and lots of connecting all the dots. Not even most Mormons are that interested or motivated to burn that many brain cells in pure research, and most people in general are just too stupid or lazy to bother at all, even if they pretend to have an earnest desire to know the truth.
It has always been the people motivated by the extreme hate and fear of Mormonism who have written and researched the most about it. Conversely, it has been the self-serving Mormon who has chosen to do the bulk of the counter-research and defense of the religion and its history. Both of these primarily religious extremes more often than not miss the very simple truth of the issue one way or another out of blind ignorance, self-interest, an anal-stage fixation on self-martyrdom, and an inflated sense of “chosenness.” The third group of Mormon researchers, in or out of the church itself, are the so-called “scholars,” who pretend to seek, record, and analyze the “facts.” The caveat there would be that they depend upon “known facts,” and “reliable records.” Re-lie the key word here, because facts are seldom known or knowable, and records are often made and kept and redacted by liars. They lie, and then lie again, or “re-lie.” Most Mormon histories are in that sense, very “re-liable.” Worse yet, is the academic’s standard defense of walking a pretended neutral line down the center of Mormon history, allowing all the factions to be a little bit right or wrong here or there, arguing the overall experience on a case-by-case basis. This is the biggest lie there is.
Given that religion is religion and you and I are not going to agree upon who is serving the devil in the ultimate, cosmic, universal sense, the fact is, from a legal, a civil and Constitutional perspective, Mormons have been basically in the right most of the time. Mormons had a Constitutional, God-given 
natural right to do what they wanted to do, live they way they wanted to live, believe what they wanted to believe, be who they wanted to be. These fundamental rights were infringed upon by an oppressive Christian social and political majority. These forces of the Christian Nation were on the wrong side of the legal, Constitutional, and even Beattitudinal arguments almost one-hundred percent of the time in their oppression of Mormonism from Joseph Smith’s first vision to Mitt Romney’s second run at the White House. In the final telling, it doesn’t matter a rat’s rectum if Joseph Smith was an earnest, but bogus impostor as a prophet or not. He had a right to pretend he talked to God, and anyone who wanted to believe it had a right to follow him, even Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman.
Furthermore, the one single time Mormonism lost a legal, Constitutional challenge was on the issue of plural marriage—a harmless social and religious contract between consenting adults that frankly is none of your bigoted Christian business. It’s certainly none of the government’s business. Anti-bigamy laws are really just anti-Mormon laws, unequally applied only to those who marry and co-habitate with their multiple sex partners, while permitting serial fornicators to continue to enjoy the fruits of marriage without any of the responsibility of marriage. The same Supreme Court that ruled Christians could define Biblically approved marital status for the non-Christian, also upheld the Dred Scott decision and gave us the “Jim Crow” era that justified racial bigotry via a similarly fallacious “separate but equal” rationale. It was a Supreme Court packed with Christian, hillbilly redneck southern justices.
Christianity’s zeal to eliminate the Mormon practice of multiple wifery really had nothing to do with Biblical interpretation or moral claims of Christian “enlightenment.” Christianity didn’t really care about the wives or the offspring of these perfectly happy and functional marriages, because its agents wholeheartedly destroyed 
these unions, imprisoned the family breadwinners and thus impoverished and left destitute their wives and children. Christian “reformers” systematically broke up the very families they pretended to care about. Christianity’s true interest in destroying Mormon plural marriage comes once again down to not allowing Mormons by the recruitment of significant numbers of eligible and fertile females into their communities, to rapidly go about out-producing and out-populating the influx of local Christians. Christianity was once again fighting for control over frontier land the Mormons had now made productive. Once again, gaining that control came down to circumventing the solid Mormon voting block.
And I guess that’s why I’ve assumed the role of abridging the Mormon historical record, gleaning out what I think would be most helpful for all sides of the Mormon question. Because, most anti-Mormon “history” 
is little more than Christian self-interested BS. This has been mindlessly countered by impassioned, “testimony-based” whimpering from Mormon defenders about how innocent and pure Joseph Smith and his band of merry men were, a woeful tale of generational victimhood designed almost exclusively to “convert” you. However, you don’t need to be “converted” to see exactly what was going on between American Christianity and early Mormons. But we don’t have to pick one or the other narrative on blind faith and just ignore contrary evidence we don’t like or doesn’t fit into the scheme we’ve already decided to believe. The truth remains, that every time some neutral investigator went into the Mormon experience, they came out giving Mormonism a fairly clean bill of health—like this little observation from BYU egghead Hugh Nibley, a faddishly popular Mormon apologist throughout the height of the last big anti-Mormon evangelical craze in the 1970’s through the 1980’s:
At the end of the last century, the great tradition of European scholarship in the grand style culminated in the person of Eduard Meyer. … No other man ever combined the learning both of the East and the classical world in a work of such high and lasting authority as Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums - the ultimate and, in fact, the last general history of antiquity to be the work of a single mind.29
This man had a particular interest in ancient religions, and it occurred to him that in Mormonism he might study at first hand how a real religion gets started. So impressed was he by the possibilities of such a study that he packed up and went to Utah in 1904, to devote a year of his priceless time to studying the Mormons.
…
Meyer’s entire Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen is a study in parallels, comparing the new religion with revealed religions of the past.30 While grandly contemptuous of Joseph Smith’s low coefficient of Kultur, the great savant illustrates at length the “exact identity” of his Church both in “atmosphere” and sundry particulars with that of the early Christians. A “striking and irrefutable” parallelism supports Mormon claims to revelation; “with perfect right” they identify themselves with the apostolic church of old. The similarity extends to the faults as well as the virtues of the Prophet and his followers—they may be matched “at every point” by the faults and virtues of the ancient prophets and the ancient church….
What Eduard Meyer sees in the Mormon doctrine is before everything else Konsequenz (consistency; to use his own words, that doctrine is “absolutely literal, sober, and logical”; verstandesgemäss). Moreover, says Meyer, the scientific aspects of the dogma, “in full agreement with the later discoveries of science,” may well be a cause of considerable gratification to believers….145
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/transcripts/?id=47
http://archaeology.about.com/library/glossary/bldef_meyere.htm
Of course, only Mormons seriously study the works of Hugh Nibley, and then only the “scholarly” BYU apologists in the Mormon academic crowd. And I would not expect anyone to take any official LDS apologist, even me, at his word alone. But I have only been trying to say what the bona fide genius, Eduard Meyer said generations ago: Mormons live and preach a consistent and logical set of basic doctrines. (Except when they have shite in their ears and get it all wrong.)
Sorry, that’s just the way it falls historically, by a preponderance of evidence. I know I originally entitled this series, What’s Wrong With Mormonism, but a centrally-governed coven of Satanic murderers, assassins, and New World Order conspirators, simply isn’t one of the things wrong with Mormonism. It never has been. In the words of the legendary frontier journalist, Horace Greely:
“Do I regard the great body of these Mormons,” he asks, “as knaves and hypocrites” Assuredly not. I do not believe there was ever a religion whereof the great mass of the adherents were not honest and sincere. Hypocrites and knaves there are in all sects; it is quite possible that some of the magnates of the Mormon church regard this so-called religion (with all others) as a contrivance for the enslavement and fleecing of the many, and the aggrandizement of the few; but I cannot believe that a sect, so considerable and so vigorous as the Mormons, was ever founded in conscious imposture, or built up on any other basis than that of earnest conviction.”
–Overland Journey, p 223
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church, Volume 4, pg 532
I would submit likewise, that Christians live and act upon their central beliefs. In this, they tend to gravitate toward imposing their religious dogma upon any and all within their dominion. This is because, unlike 
Mormonism, or for that matter, the Founding Fathers, who’s central doctrines revolve around the blessings of man’s “Free Agency,” and are anchored to the concept of a Constitutionally protected, pluralistic nation that guarantees religious liberty for all, Christianity to this day is based upon the fundamental belief that all non-Christians are the literal spawn of the devil. Non-Christians are “infidels” or “heathens,” and have no place in a Christian society. In Christian theology, the “unredeemed” constitute only an ongoing threat to a Christian Nation. Unlike Mormonism, Christianity has had a long, storied history of universal, unflinching aggression, oppression, extermination, torture, murder and persecution of its rivals. Christianity had conducted its program of violent dominance of “lesser” religions and peoples, both covertly, and also quite openly and proudly, much of which has been vaingloriously committed to record, proudly, by Christianity’s highest officials and most stalwart leaders.
When I got into the whole Mountain Meadows record, in the course of my explorations, I was quite prepared to concede that Christianity had me and my dumbassed Mormon brethren dead-nailed in this one instance. Unfortunately, even though Mountain Meadows represents just the sort of colossal screw-up Mormonism has always 
been capable of, this turns out to be the case only by accident, out of sheer stupid irony, rather than centralized malice and design.
Sure, some of the anti-Mormon literature can be quite convincing if you simply intended to hate or ridicule Mormons in the first place. But, you don’t have to go to the local Christian fellowship hall and hear some evangelical nutjob dressed in a scary Mormon temple costume or modeling frumpy “magic” Mormon underwear with his worship-team of conspiracy-theory clowns, to feel like you have reliable, non-Mormon sources who can tell us what early Mormonism’s problems really came down to. We don’t have to guess what early Mormons kept doing that was always annoying the Christian population around them. This we can read from sources like Governor Ford’s on-the-spot, direct evaluation of the real problem neighboring Christians had with the Mormon presence in Illinois. Ford is well on the mark, inasmuch as the same primary complaint got the Saints thrown out of Missouri previously:
But the great cause of popular fury was, that the Mormons at several preceding elections had cast their vote as a unit, thereby making the fact apparent that no one could aspire to the honors or offices of the country, within the sphere of their influence, without their approbation and votes. It appears to be one of the principles by which they insist upon being governed as a community, to act as a unit in all matters of government and religion. They express themselves to be fearful that if division should be encouraged in politics, it would soon extend to their religion, and rend their church with schism and into sects.
This seems to me to be an unfortunate view of the subject, and more unfortunate in practice, as I am well satisfied that it must be the fruitful source of excitement, violence, and mobocracy, whilst it is persisted in. It is indeed unfortunate for their peace that they do not divide in elections, according to their individual preferences or political principles, like other people.
http://www.boap.org/LDS/History/History_of_the_Church/Vol_VII
You couldn’t however, do a damned thing about American citizens who didn’t vote the way you wanted them to vote. (Legally that is…) You couldn’t do a damned thing if people wanted to form a club, or a church, or a fraternity, like the Freemasons, or the Elks, or the Boy Scouts, or the John Birch Society—and then sit around, fellowship, share philosophies, and decide to all vote the same way. First in Missouri, and then in Illinois, old Christian settlers, badgered and alarmed by their insistent clergy, goaded by their eager press, went about contriving and building up the public image of an inherent Mormon threat, simply to stifle their vote. Even though there was no evidence of immediate or tangible villainous Mormon action, or any clear indication of a dangerous Mormon movement toward brutal conquest, Christian champions have always had a plethora of distant, anecdotal stories of terror to tell. It was, the anti-Mormonists have always contended, only because the Mormons didn’t quite yet dominate the political scene, it was only because they didn’t have the sheer political force to dominate all of Christendom, that they now pretend for the time being, to be so friendly and harmless. They second they got into power—bam! Then they’d take all the Christians out and reveal their true plans for world domination.
Governor Ford continues his evaluation of the unified Mormon voting block phenomenon:
This one principle and practice of theirs arrayed against them in deadly hostility all aspirants for office who were not sure of their support, all who have been unsuccessful in elections, and all who were too proud to court their influence, with all their friends and connections.
These also were the active men in blowing up the fury of the people, in hopes that a popular movement might be set on foot, which would result in the expulsion or extermination of the Mormon voters. For this purpose public meetings had been called; inflammatory speeches had been made; exaggerated reports had been extensively circulated; committees had been appointed, who rode night and day to spread the reports and solicit the aid of neighboring counties, and at a public meeting at Warsaw, resolutions were passed to expel or exterminate the Mormon population. This was not, however, a movement which was unanimously concurred in. The county contained a goodly number of inhabitants in favor of peace, or who at least desired to be neutral in such a contest. These were stigmatized by the name of “Jack-Mormons,” and there were not a few of the more furious exciters of the people who openly expressed their intention to involve them in the common expulsion or extermination.
A system of excitement and agitation was artfully planned and executed with tact. It consisted in spreading reports and rumors of the most fearful character. As examples: — On the morning before my arrival at Carthage, I was awakened at an early hour by the frightful report, which was asserted with confidence and apparent consternation, that the Mormons had already commenced the work of burning, destruction, and murder, and that every man capable of bearing arms was instantly wanted at Carthage for the protection of the county. We lost no time in starting; but when we arrived at
Carthage we could hear no more concerning this story. Again, during the few days that the militia were encamped at Carthage, frequent applications were made to me to send a force here, and a force there, and a force all about the country, to prevent murders, robberies, and larcenies which, it was said, were threatened by the Mormons. No such forces were sent; nor were any such offenses committed at that time, except the stealing of some provisions, and there was never the least proof that this was done by a Mormon. Again, on my late visit to Hancock county, I was informed by some of their violent enemies that the larcenies of the Mormons had become unusually numerous and insufferable. They admitted that but little had been done in this way in their immediate vicinity. But they insisted that sixteen horses had been stolen by the Mormons in one night near Lima, in the county of Adams. At the close of the expedition, I called at this same town of Lima, and upon inquiry, was told that no horses had been stolen in that neighborhood, but that sixteen horses had been stolen in one night in Hancock county. This last informant being told of the Hancock story, again changed the venue to another distant settlement in the northern edge of Adams.
If you cannot accept any part of this reasoning so far, I am only wasting your time. If you are willing to entertain at least the notion that the Mormons are all deluded fools who often come off like ignorant and egocentric buffoons, and yet are willing to confess that none of this is punishable by law, then perhaps I have made some progress. Mormon delusion is as Constitutionally protected as Christian delusion.
I’m preaching only one very limited sermon here. I am merely asking you to accept, as Thomas Ford, governor of Illinois, the supreme commander of the state that killed Joseph Smith deduced: when it comes down to it, all the titillating claims of Mormon outrages throughout the years, almost invariably turn out to be willow-the-wisps. Rumors. Wild goose chases. When you get there in person to check it out, there almost never appears to be any concrete examples, only anecdotes passed around third hand.
Mormonism, consequently, having not actually exposed any specific legal premise, has been politically, socially, and at times very physically punished by a Christian America based primarily upon what Christianity imagines it would be up to if it were in Mormonism’s place.
Mormonism, I repeat for emphasis, has almost utterly escaped serious self-incrimination from Day-1. There is one resounding exception. That would be the clear-cut assassination of roughly 120 men, women, and older children of the emigrant Fancher Party by a handful of local Mormon leaders and their minions at Mountain Meadows in 1857. And that is one whopping exception. What these particular Mormons did to their ostensibly “Christian” foes is fairly obvious. And hideous. The question of “why” these particular Mormons shot down this particular group of “Christians” isn’t so easy to pin down however. But I will warn you that if you continue honestly digging into the matter, if the one person you want to hang the crime on is Brigham Young or anyone in the official Mormon hierarchy, again, all you come up with is a lot of dangerous rhetoric, murky anecdotal assumptions, and mostly a lot of bold assertion.
Likewise, if you want to put Mountain Meadows down to its perpetrators following some clear mandate out of general LDS doctrine or arising out of a simple extrapolation of central Mormon theology, you will again be unrewarded. The Christian nemeses of Mormonism have tried earnestly to obfuscate the chronology of the events leading up to Mountain Meadows, but the simple fact remains that Christian America had already decided to exterminate Mormonism months before the Fancher Party got anywhere near Utah Territory. Mountain Meadows is not the “reason” James Buchannan sent an army to kill off the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The tragedy at Mountain Meadows was the direct result of America’s determination to destroy Mormonism, not vice-versa. Had a pack of Christian reformers, disgruntled federal appointees and contract-holders, not gone tattling back to Washington with the usual litany of grossly exaggerated tales of Mormon “outrages,” deliberately trying to provoke a federal assault upon the Mormon capital, there would have been no US invasion of Utah Territory. If there had been no invasion, the Mormon officials in southern Utah would have had no cause to hold up the Fancher’s wagon train, no cause to withhold basic provisions from them, and the Fancher Party would have passed, with only some slight complaining on both sides, peaceably through Utah without incident.
And it pains me to say this, but it must be pointed out. The bastard Mormons who wiped out the Fancher company and friends, learned how it was done from the Fancher’s idiot, hillbilly, redneck, hick cousins back in Missouri and Illinois. They didn’t do anything to the “good Christian” Fancher and Baker families that the “good Christian” kin of the Fanchers and Bakers, and certainly the Missouri Wildcats amongst them, hadn’t already done to the Mormons, en-masse, repeatedly, and in spades.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre on a personal level is a great miscarriage of justice and human tragedy. In the great, “Christian America” scheme of things, however, it is a small blip on the anti-Mormon political agenda. In an of itself, it was officially, on both sides, dismissed as collateral damage, an unintended consequence of a short war that was pointless to begin with and concluded peacefully in the end. Today, Mountain Meadows would be little more than a historical afterthought, were it not for the unshakeable true-believers, the serious anti-Mormonists, who still pull it out of their sleeves like a trump card, to add just that little bit of credibility to the contention that subsequent legal sanctions levied against the Mormon religion, were fair and rational. Even sensible and unavoidable.
With the utmost respect, it has to be understood that the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre have been made into poster children for THE BIG LIE. Their memory is desecrated every time some evangelical clown uses them to “prove” Brigham Young was a devil worshipper and the Mormons are all clandestine killers. The “good Christians” who continually exploit the deaths of these unfortunate souls to sell their books and trinkets and scary lecture tours full of horror stories of Brigham Young’s deluded slaves and “Danite” henchmen, rather than honor their memory, probably only leaves the Fancher Party blushing and apologetic in the hereafter.
If you can’t get over that, then, as I say, I am wasting your time. Mormonism has lots of problems. Again, secret death squads isn’t one of them.
Mormon Wars Part 3: Hillbilly Rednecks
In every case of bona-fide Mormon “outrage” against Christian antagonists, the actual record proves that the Mormons were the original injured parties, that they were only guilty of re-action, and in every case, this reaction became necessary only because civil protection had been denied them and they were left to fend for themselves. So they fended. Sometimes not so skillfully, sometimes not so fairly. Often not so calmly.
Sometimes not very rationally.
Still, even “neutral” historians constantly feel obligated to point out that many of these Mormon reactions to Christianity’s non-stop persecution were over-reactions, and sometimes this led to collateral damage against innocent parties. No dispute there. Valid criticism. From the perspective of a minority community being systematically tormented, and when viewed within the context of a continual struggle against an openly hostile surrounding culture possessing superior numbers and openly avowing the death and destruction of Mormonism and all its adherents, men, women, and children, it must be conceded that it would be easy for the Mormon community to “over”-react to threats, real, and imagined. For instance:
Bill for Removing of the Press of the “Nauvoo Expositor.”
Resolved by the city council of the city of Nauvoo, that the printing office from whence issues the Nauvoo Expositor is a public nuisance; and also of said Nauvoo Expositors which may be or exist in said establishment; and the mayor is instructed to cause said establishment and papers to be removed without delay, in such manner as he shall direct.
Passed June 10th, 1844. Geo. W. Harris, President pro tem.
W. Richards, Recorder.
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 284
Why did Mayor Smith and his city council think the Nauvoo Expositor a public nuisance? Apart from the lame serial dramas, the bad poetry features, and poor writing in general, is had been established right under the nose of Joseph Smith by several apostate Mormons who’d been excommunicated for wanting to set up their own franchise on multiple wives–only they didn’t want to actually marry any of them, and though they were claiming they had it, they certainly didn’t think they needed Smith’s approval. It was the Nauvoo Expositor’s only mission to harangue Joseph Smith particularly over the plural marriage issue, call him names, make charges of villainy and pretend he was behind the sex orgies and covert assassination squads its founders had been excommunicated for attempting to set up in the Mormon community under his name. Any other content in the rag was an exercise in vanity on the part of the contributors, and scarcely journalism anyway. And yes, they were “exposing” some sensitive doctrines about plural marriage Smith didn’t want publicly explored yet, and certainly not by a group he’d tried to rid himself of, and who now were deliberately attempting to twist a touchy doctrinal revelation before the public via the most unflattering and distorted characterizations of plural marriage a group of whore mongers, abortionists, lechers, and thugs could contrive. That sort of thing emanating from the capital of Mormonism could get a lot of Mormons killed.
O
r at least, that was obviously the essential opinion of the Nauvoo City Council.
The press was destroyed and the type was melted in a bonfire in the street. Was that an over-reaction? Perhaps. But not considering that anti-Mormon presses all around them were bringing death and persecution already, and one more from the heart of Mormonism would only add credibility to the already dangerous hyperbole being used against the church.
Was the Nauvoo Expositor’s destruction legal? As a zoning matter, yes, marginally. Was the "public nuisance" legal ploy used Constitutional? If proposed as a zoning issue, perhaps yes, in the same way you might ban whorehouses or sex shops or gun and whiskey stores near school playgrounds and so forth–in which case the Expositor’s company would simply be free to set up shop outside city limits. But, as Joseph Smith replied to this line of inquiry:
…In relation to the press, you say that you differ from me in opinion. Be it so; the thing, after all, is only a legal difficulty, and the courts, I should judge, are competent to decide on that matter. If our act was illegal, we are willing to meet it…
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 437
http://www.archive.org/stream/risefallofnauvoo00byu2robe#page/n3/mode/2up
The old Christian settlers and their apostate-Mormon enablers replied to this reasoned appeal to the law by shooting Joseph Smith all to hell before he could get into a courtroom. Joseph Smith had a habit of winning these sorts of legal challenges, from New York to Illinois, year after year, case after case. It was easier to just kill him than risk another loss. I’m not guessing. This is what was openly boasted by the mob before they murdered him. Then they raided, beat, pillaged, burned, tortured, shot, stabbed, and cannonaded their way through the rest of the local Mormon population, systematically, until they had all been killed or driven into the western wilderness.
So, you tell me. Who really over-reacted?
The question is, why were Mormons hated and persecuted? Was it really brought upon themselves via their overtly evil practices? Did their peaceful, God-loving neighbors spontaneously rebel against their tyranny in an attempt to liberate themselves from despotic Mormon oppression? Christian apologists will keep trying to sell you on that concept. But that’s not what history shows. History reveals a preponderance of evidence suggesting that Mormons are a very accommodating and industrious people. History however, also shows that if you heap enough crap on a Mormon he’ll eventually get fed up and kick your ass. And then he’ll want to keep kicking your ass until you aren’t a problem for him any more. All that proves is, Mormons are human beings.
The question again is, why did Mormonism’s frontier neighbors want to heap a load of poo on them in the first place, and just who was doing it?
Two simple answers: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christians were persecuting the early Mormons, and they were doing it for two reasons—religion and politics. In the mind of the WASP, or really most any other period Christian however, that’s only one reason. Christians have always believed that religion and politics are inseparable, and that the arm of civil law must necessarily be expressly Christian to protect and enforce their Christian faith. In more liberal, even “mainstream” Christian sects today, this notion has been all but abandoned in favor of an almost equally self-hating and suicidal sense of “political correctness” that puts dog-worshippers, Satanists, Islamo-Jihadists, or GLBT neo-Pagan druidic sodomites on the same moral level as any of the Christian sects—with the exception of course of Mormonism. In that case, Liberal and Moderate Christians still choose to hate Mormons because they dare maintain that donkey-lovers and sexually altered sodomites don’t deserve the same rights to adoption and marriage as good Christian men and women do, and hold other “intolerant” social views about “negroes,” or so they believe. But even today the bulk of the Religious Right mentally screen and edit the inspired words of the Founding Fathers, and deduce that the Constitutional authors had always intended to form a nation built upon a document designed to protect American Christians from the polluting ideas and practices of the infidel. If you want to make some equivalent charge against the Mormons, if you want to claim that Mormonism is all about forcing an exclusive LDS theocracy upon the United States and the world in general, you’re fighting a litany of canonized LDS expressions of loyalty to the US Constitution and its principles. A simple Google of Mormon patriotism will instantly produce volumes of open, pluralistic professions of respect for Jeffersonian religious liberty from Mormon leadership, spanning over two centuries of their church.
As I have said to you before, so I say again, the Constitution of the United States is a great and treasured part of my religion, and the revelations of the Lord and the words of our inspired leaders compel it to be so. The overturning, or the material changing, or the distortion of any fundamental principle of our constitutional government would thus do violence to my religion.
God grant that this people shall never give the lie to Brother Brigham, and that ever and always "the Elders of Israel will protect and sustain civil and religious liberty and every constitutional right bequeathed to us by our fathers."
–J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Stand Fast by Our Constitution, pp. 8-9
I have ranted frequently about the “Secret Constitution” of the old Christian settlers in the Mormon persecutions and expulsions from various counties in Missouri–including expulsion from one established specifically for Mormons by the state legislature, Caldwell. A “Mob Manifesto,” and an Extermination order from Missouri’s governor are hard to defend even today, even by the most apologetic Christian apologists. (They give it a good try anyway.) But it is seldom mentioned by Mormon or anti-Mormonist alike, that a similar, highly organized, Christian, Darwinian democracy-styled resolution was drafted by some nine counties around Nauvoo. These Christian patriots in southern Illinois, in the name of American liberty, drafted a compact, like their brethren had across the river in Missouri, issuing a demand for total Mormon expulsion from the state, under a bit more carefully worded threat of extermination, but a threat nonetheless. Christian mobbers had by then of course, learned to be a little craftier at the tactics and language they used, to give their “spontaneous” mob violence and predatory, pack-mentality the sweet smell of law and order. In the Illinois version of deputizing the anti-Mormon mob, the first step was to repeal the Nauvoo City charter, which they pulled off in 1845, less than a year after murdering Joseph Smith. This removed from the Mormon community any legal standing to act in their own defense. As unincorporated land, Nauvoo and environs were stripped of a police force, local courts, local government, and most importantly, the Nauvoo Legion, which was a legislatively chartered city militia. Nauvoo was at that point dependent singularly upon the good graces of the County Sheriff for their only legal protection. The State Attorney, Josiah Lamborn, commented on this maneuver in a letter to Brigham Young:
I have always considered that your enemies have been prompted by political and religious prejudices, and by a desire for plunder and blood, more than for the common good. By the repeal of your charter, and by refusing all amendments and modifications, our legislature has given a kind of sanction to the barbarous manner in which you have been treated. Your two representatives exerted themselves to the extent of their ability in your behalf, but the tide of poplar passion and frenzy was too strong to be resisted. It is truly a melancholy spectacle to witness the law-makers of a sovereign State condescending to pander to the vices, ignorance and malevolence of a class of people who are at all times ready for riot, murder, and rebellion.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
http://books.google.com/books?id=PMAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=the+rise+and+fall+of+nauvoo&source
Vol. ? Friday, March 20, 1840. No. ?For the Register.
THE MOBBING SPIRIT OF MISSOURI REKINDLING IN ILLINOIS.The following is a statement of facts that may be relied on:
A short time since it was ascertained that a Mr. Clark, a member of the Methodist Episcopal church in Logan county, had in his possession the Book of Mormon. For this glaring outrage he was severely reprimanded, deprived of his station as a class leader, and the book demanded of him by his preachers, a Mr. Martin and a Mr. Watt.
He (the said Clark) contended that the book was his own property, and unless they bought it, they could not have the same. Accordingly, the necessary sum was raised, and paid for the book. Shortly after the said book was taken into De Witt county, to a Quarterly Conference meeting, there to await its final trial, and it was condemned, and burnt to ashes — the judges themselves being the executioners. And what is still more appalling, Mr. Watt, a preacher, has been heard unblushingly to assert, that if burning the book would not do, they would next burn the Mormons themselves. If testimony is required on this subject, it can be had at any time. AB’MPALMER.
Springfield, Ill., Mar. 12.
The Christian mobocracy had already secured the loyalty of most state and local officials before assassinating Joseph Smith. Some of it was willing, some of it reluctant, some active and some just key conspirators looking the other way at just the right moment. But there was one frustrating
exception; the County Sheriff, JB Backenstos, who insisted in upholding his oath of office, much to the mobocracy’s consternation. The Christian mob had however, insured that their version of the “truth” of their past, present, and future violence against the Mormons would get to the federal government, by electing one of Smith’s murderers, an indicted, first-hand participant in the Mormon founder’s execution via lynch mob at Carthage, to represent their state as a US Senator. State Attorney Lamborn had a bit to say about that as well:
Your senator, Jacob C. Davis, has done much to poison the minds of members [of Congress] against anything in your favor. He walks at large in defiance of the law an indicted murderer. If a Mormon was in his position, the senate would afford no protection, but he would be dragged forth to jail or the gallows, or be shot down by a cowardly and brutal mob.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
The next thing the Hancock County Holy Conspirators did was rally a mass meeting of Christian crusaders at Quincy, 22 September of that year. In spite of frequent small-scale mobbing, looting, burning and other intimidations, Mormons were still hanging out in Nauvoo. They had committed to complete their first major temple before they left it to the heathen to be defiled, and in the meantime were using it to initiate and “endow” as many of the Saints as possible with covenants Mormons take upon themselves in the course of educational theatrical sketches essentially, stories told in formalized, ritual ceremonial form, which occur therein and only therein. An ad-hoc mob committee had already demanded to know the intentions of the Mormons remaining in the vicinity. The Mormons responded that their desire was to simply live in peace, but ultimately the entire body of the church had plans to relocate in the West. The Quincy committee issued a resolution on 24 September, containing a number of clauses, all of which demanded that the Mormons had to leave in the Spring, and that they were not to be allowed to prosecute criminally or civilly any accused old Christian settlers, and that these old Christian mobbers were to be allowed to return to Mormon areas, unmolested and unprosecuted for any crimes against the Mormons they admittedly may have committed. Josiah B Conyers, who wrote A Brief History of the Hancock Mob, commented on the first of these clauses:
The first one, in our opinion, is unique. They accepted and recommended to the people of the surrounding counties to accept an unconditional proposition to remove. But understand, Mr. Mormon, though we accept it and recommend the surrounding counties to do so likewise, (reprobate you, unconditionally) we do not intend to bring ourselves under any obligation to purchase your property, or to furnish purchasers; but we will be very kind and obliging, and will in no way, hinder or obstruct you in your efforts to sell, provided, nevertheless, this shall not be so construed as to prevent us from running off the purchaser. But we expect this small favor of you; viz., that you must dispose of your property, and leave at the appointed time.
–History of the Hancock Mob, Conyers, pgs 13, 14
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 353
The Quincy anti-Mormonists concluded their meeting by drafting a general military strategy for the forceful removal of Mormonism from their God-given lands. They appointed the leadership of a sizeable military contingent also organized thus to meet the challenge of violently contending with any Mormons foolish enough to linger or dawdle past their deadline.
As I have implied, the Quincy committee then met with a similar group at Carthage, and together rallied an even larger convention which was held at Carthage, comprising religious, law enforcement, civil, militia, and volunteer forces from all nine surrounding counties. The Carthage assembly adopted all the principle resolutions of the Quincy gathering, adding a litany of crimes and outrages charged against most of the Mormon leadership by way of justification for said expulsion of all Mormons from the state. There was one further enablement they demanded:
Resolved, that it is expected as an indispensable condition to the pacification of the county, that the old citizens be permitted to return to their homes unmolested by the present sheriff (Backenstos,) and the Mormons, for anything alleged against them; any attempt on their part to arrest or prosecute such persons for pretended offenses will inevitably lead to a renewal of the late disorder. [Meaning wholesale riot and warfare against the Mormons.]
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 354
Having thus named Sheriff Backenstos personally, it was assumed he would back down from the nine-county threat. It was also moved that WN Purple, judge of the judicial circuit court be “requested” to withhold the fall session in Hancock County, on the grounds that opening the Mormon complaints against the old Christian settlers would again, result in open mob violence against the Mormons, so it was for their own protection. In this manner, Christianity had castrated the Sheriff, and if he dared arrest any of them, he now had no court and no judge to drag them to anyway. The only justice in southern Illinois was the mob.
The scene was brightly set for unfettered Christian fury to be released upon Mormondom, but that pesky sheriff, Backenstos, wouldn’t back off. And even in the regular State Militia’s ranks, the Mormons found many strong defenders. On 11 February, 1846, Brigham Young, the Twelve, and the High Council, made a show for the mobs of crossing the Mississippi on a fortuitous coating of ice, and made camp in distant Iowa. By the last of April, the main exodus had begun and the great majority of the Saints had vacated Nauvoo. Rather than easing the anticipation of the Christian defenders of liberty, and with the blessing of regional clergy, the mob saw no point in making even a token offer for what they could easily take by force, or inherit by default, simply by driving off the now greatly diminished body of Mormon stragglers.
An Illinois State Militia Major named Warren was commissioned to supervise Hancock County during this forced emigration process. He maintained peace with an even hand, but his orders had expected him to retreat from the vicinity once the main move had been completed. This news, he noted, was obviously of great anticipation amongst the old Christian settlers. He advised the governor that there was still a fair Mormon presence in the area and the wolves had begun to circle around them. His orders were changed to remain in defense of those Mormons who were attempting to pack up or sell the abandoned Mormon property. The problem was, a fair contingent of Mormons were to old or ill or broke to brave the trip immediately, and others had hoped to remain till the end of the summer to consummate their large number of pending sales and other business transactions, and protect personal, civic, church and communal property until it was sold or carted out. This short delay was too much for the old Christian mobbers. Again, they fell back into their old tricks of instigation and intimidation. Major Warren felt it necessary to put the mobs on notice by circulating a handbill:
The undersigned again deems it his duty to appear before you in a circular. It may not be known to all of you, that the day after my detachment was disbanded at Carthage, I received orders from the executive to muster them into service again, and remain in the county until further orders.
I have now been in Nauvoo with my detachment a week and can
say to you with perfect assurance that the demonstrations made by the Mormon population , are unequivocal. They are leaving the State, and preparing to leave, with every means that God and nature has placed in their hands. … The anti-Mormons desire the removal of the Mormons; this is being effected peaceably and with all possible dispatch. All aggressive movements, therefore, against them at this time, must be actuated by a wanton desire to shed blood, or to plunder. …
A man of near sixty years of age, living about seven miles from this place, was taken from his house a few nights since, stripped of his clothing, and his back cut to pieces with a whip, for no other reason than because he was a Mormon, and too old to make successful resistance. Conduct of this kind would disgrace a horde of savages. … To the Mormons I would say, go on with your preparations and leave as fast as you can. Leave the fighting to be done by my detachment. If we are overpowered, then recross the river, and defend yourselves and property.
The fighting in Nauvoo progressed rapidly to full-scale warfare with canon and ball on both sides. The State Militia split and fought itself, one faction with the Christian-sponsored mobs, one faction defending the Mormons.
The Ba
ttle of Nauvoo was the final chapter in the forceful expulsion of the Mormons from Nauvoo. The so-called Anti-Mormon Party, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the "Regulators," were bent on driving the remaining citizens out by force despite the well-known fact that most had gone and the rest were making plans to do so.
Some 600 to 1,000 strong, the Regulators were led first by Col. John Singleton and later by John Carlin of Carthage. The core of this unlawful mob was none other than the notorious Carthage Greys, who had played such a prominent role in the murders of Joseph and Hyrum two years before.
On the other side, two groups defended the city: the "Spartan Band" of heavily armed Latter-day Saints, and the "Kill Devils" made up of several of the so-called "new citizens," that is recent non-Mormon move-ins who had a vested interest in preserving property values.
Gov. Thomas Ford, sensing imminent conflict, commissioned Major James R. Parker of the 32nd Regiment of the Illinois State Militia to order all the would-be combatants to return to their homes and "preserve the peace." Parker, seeing the determination of Carlin’s force to wreak havoc on the city regardless of executive order, and sensing Ford’s reluctance to dispatch a large regiment of neutral militiamen, followed the course of political expediency by signing a treaty with Singleton which called for peace and disarmament. Singleton and Parker then quit the field and the Regulators chose Col. Thomas Brockman ("Old Tom") to finish what Singleton had refused to do.
On Sept. 10, 1846, Brockman ordered the first assault on the city comp
lete with cannon fire, driving families out of their homes and down toward the river. The first real exchange of volleys came two days later, on Sept. 12, and for the next four days the bell tower porch of the Nauvoo Temple served as an ideal perch from which to view the several forays and skirmishes across roadways, backyards and cornfields. Nauvoo’s defenders responded with cannon fire of their own. Despite a valiant resistance in which few men were killed on either side, by Sept. 16 the Nauvoo defenders had agreed to surrender the city.
The "Articles of Accommodation, Treaty and Agreement" – drawn up between the Nauvoo Trustees (John S. Fullmer, Almon W. Babbitt and Joseph L. Heywood) on the one side and Brockman and Carlin on the other and chaired by Andrew Johnson of the Quincy Committee) – stipulated the immediate surrender of the city and of all arms in return for a pledge of safety and protection for people and property. The defenders soon disbanded and about 3 p.m. on Sept. 17 the mob, numbering more than 1,500, marched into the city, down Mulholland Street to the temple, then to Main Street and down to Parley Street where Henry I. Young gave up the temple keys to Johnson.
The invaders, however, showed little respect for temple or treaty. Parties of armed men ransacked and desecrated the temple while others roamed around the city ordering families to leave within two hours or other short notice. Many of the sick were treated with cruelty and families were molested while burying their dead. Others went from house to house plundering cow yards, pigpens, hen roosts, and bee stands, tearing up floors and otherwise destroying property with impunity.
Meanwhile an unidentified preacher ascended the temple tower and proclaimed with a loud voice, "Peace, Peace, Peace to the inhabitants of the Earth, now the Mormons are driven."5
The Mormons never really had a prayer making friends anywhere in the Midwestern region. In the end, it was inevitable by sheer force of numbers, that the frontier politicians, Christian preachers, Godless capitalists out to make a buck, and their attendant, Scots-Irish, Tennessee enforcement mob would win. The entire area was ruled by hick mobs for generations afterward.
As Governor Thomas Ford, the man Mormons still claim set up their first prophet for mob execution summed it up:
I had a good opportunity to know the early settlers of Hancock county. I had attended the circuit courts there as States-attorney, form 1830, when the county was first organized, up to the year 1834; and to my certain knowledge the early settlers, with some honorable exceptions, were, in popular language, hard cases.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wZcontent/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
I won’t reiterate the whole history of Christian persecution of non-Christians. I won’t rehash the Christian persecution and common extermination of its own body–those deemed by the ruling Christian faction of the day to be heretical. That history speaks for itself and is certainly exposed adequately throughout my twenty-five previous essays in this seri
es. Mormons are not only outside any historical view of Christian orthodoxy but Joseph Smith personally insulted the entire world Christian community by telling them they had lost the plot. So all of organized religion, all of American Christianity, openly sanctioned the genocide of the “Mormon Race,” as it was often called. American Christianity’s jihad against Mormonism was an openly published mission, so well documented that any Christian attempting to dispute it makes a total ass out of himself without any help from me. (But I do what I can to help them out.)
Again, it’s not as if Mormons were the first victims of Christian vigilante justice in Illinois:
…As late as 1831 a gang almost controlled Pope and Massac counties, and even built a fort which had to be taken by storm by a small army of regulators. In 1837 occurred the better-known riots at Alton. A mob threw into the river the press of the Alton Observer, an Abolition newspaper published by Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy and a member of the mob were killed in a subsequent clash, and a second press destroyed. At about the same time Ogle, Winnebago, Lee and De Kalb counties all suffered from “organized bands of rogues, engaged in murders, robberies, horse-stealing, and in making and passing counterfeit money.
In 1841 in Ogle County a family of criminals named Driscoll shot down a Captain Campbell, of the respectables of the county, before the eyes of his family. Driscoll and one of his sons were convicted of the murder by a kangaroo court. “They were placed in a kneeling position, with bandages over their eye
s, and were fired upon by the whole company present, that there might be none who could be legal witnesses of the bloody deed. About one hundred of these men were afterwards tried for the murder and acquitted.
One would think that the violence at Carthage Jail in 1844 would have sickened the people of the state, but the conflicts that followed in Hancock county were by no means the only disturbances to trouble Governor ford. Another small civil war took place in Pope and Masaac counties in 1846. The militia of Union County, called in to keep the peace, refused to protect the suspected bandits and left the counties to the government of regulators, who, as always, began by terrorizing known criminals, moved to threatening the suspected, and ended hated and feared by honest and peaceful men.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Governor Ford again gives us an example of his “hard cases”:
A party of about twenty regulators went to the house of an old man named Mathis…. He and his wife resisted the arrest. The old woman being unusually strong and active, knocked down the one or two of the party with her fists. A gun was then presented to her breast accompanied by a threat of blowing her heart out if she continued her resistance. She caught the gun and shoved it downwards, when it went off and shot her through the thigh…. The party captured old man Mathis, and carried him away with them, since which time he has not been heard of, but is supposed to have been murdered.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Who were these “regulators?” Well, it was a generation or two before the flour bags with holes cut into them, and perhaps three generations before the pointy hats and flaming crosses, but one could think of them as precursors to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—a little neo-regulator outfit that later on likewise bedeviled the LDS Church. And of course, niggers, Kikes, Papist bastards, thieving redskins, Freemasons, foreigners of all stripes, Abolitionists, and so forth. (In their own unvarnished words.)
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a terrorist organization[11] by veterans of the Confederate Army.[16] They named it after the Greek word kuklos, which means circle. The name means "Circle of Brothers."[17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1381.html
http://www.conspirazzi.com/?p=657
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.sjsapush.com/ch4.php
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2009_summer_fall/regulators-movement-2.html
The KKK and these later frontier regulators are not to be confused with the original Regulator Movement, which actually began in 1760-1771, just before the American Revolution, as an uprising in North Carolina against corrupt colony officials. In South Carolina, around 1767, a group of farmers likewise organized an enforcement body to “regulate” back country affairs, which in their locale meant primarily ferreting out ruffians, highwaymen, thieves, and scoundrels of all sorts. Perhaps taking up the idea from North Carolinians, Yankee “regulators” essentially pulled off the Boston Tea Party. One of their chief features at the time was disguising themselves as Indians in the course of their dastardly deeds. One very famous “regulator” outfit was known as the “Sons of Liberty.”
Following the Regulator Movement in North Carolina (1766-1771), Sandy Creek Baptists played a key role in the tremendous growth of the Baptist denomination in the South, and their political beliefs influenced the changing views regarding the common man in America throughout the late eighteenth century.
While a noble effort on many levels, it was during this original regulator era that southern rednecks, Scots-Irish, mostly poor or working-class citizens, seemed to connect with a Calvinized Southern Baptist, Fundamentalist religious orientation, which in turn combined with a political belief that America was holy land set aside by God in which to build the ultimate, pure, Christian Nation. (An exclusively white, rednecked, Fundamentalist, slave-holding, Protestant Christian Nation that is.) Baptists had been persecuted from the Old 
World through the New England Colonial era, but in the American South, variants of this sect finally found a power-base amongst an ambitiously predatory class of generally disrespected “Ulster Scots,” or Protestant Irish, who had largely emigrated from Scotland to Ireland, and then on to the American colonies. Many of these immigrants left their homeland under dubious circumstances, and in general either never amounted to much in their homeland, were fleeing or being "transported" for criminal charges, or just desperate to escape hunger and poverty. They were keen converts to a message of the "American Dream," and a promised "Manifest Destiny."
By 1771 however, both the North and South Carolinian Regulators had been forcibly disbanded, more or less in deference to the greater power of the Crown and Tidewater Aristocracy. And here we have the Appalachian, East Tennessee, Born-Again connection to Mormon persecution appearing at its root: One of these groups of Regulators fled to what is now Tennessee, and there formed the Wautaga association from land leased from the Cherokee. They brought with them their own culture and tribal, shadow government. Their religious and civic orientation centered around a Christian Vigilante motif. To be expected, they soon stole all the rest of the Cherokee land in the region, with the help of fellow Scots-Irish, Calvinist rednecks like president Andrew Jackson. Then they stole all the land from all the Indians. Then they kicked out the Indians entirely–even the "civilized" and "Christianized" ones. It’s a pattern of behavior that is unmistakable in the Christian Nation, “Manifest Destiny” community. And when they’d filled Appalachia to brimming with themselves and their friends, they began to spread their self-“regulating” culture west to Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and everywhere ol’ "Hickory"Andrew Jackson’s favorite Scots-Irish rednecks eventually migrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/sons.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0851561.html
By the first few decades of the 1800’s, in the wild west of Missouri and southern Illinois, any altruistic,
patriotic notion of a “regulator” had entirely degenerated from its original ethical mission. The title had been appropriated by half-assed mobs, loosely directed by ad-hoc vigilance committees. Most of these were hangers-on to Christian Fundamentalist, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant-supremist, sometimes nativist cabals, most of them connected to pro-slavery movements, particularly pro-slavery Christian churches, intent upon dominating local politics. Until the Baptists showed up, most of these churches were Southern Presbyterian offshoots, Episcopal or Methodist/Episcopal, dissenters originally split off of the Church of England over a disagreement with the English Crown’s claim as head of the Church. Yes, and give the Southern Baptist Convention it’s due: most of the pro-slave, Fundamentalist, Biblically-justified Christian Nation rationale came from the Americanized, Southern Baptist/Redneck Regulator ideologies. They were highly motivating notions that found a wide base of approval in the New Christian World. Indeed, the Knights of the Golden Circle, America’s first genuine, nation-wide, home-grown vigilante hate group, began to organize in 1846 while the Mormons of Illinois were still bugging out. These pro-slavery, redneck mobs, became highly organized, secretive, and succeeded in infiltrating political bodies, police forces, and militias. Their tactics were most effective, and it is this secret order which is credited with spawning numerous, famous outlaw gangs both before and after the Civil War, effecting the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and later evolving into the KKK, among other things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle
The Warsaw Regulators for example, were in the core of the mob that stormed Carthage Jail to kill Joseph Smith. They, like all the other “regulators,” of the era, began as vigilante squads of bored farmers, ex-militia and militia with nothing to do for excitement, backslidden rabble along for the ride, and clandestine thugs just out for a thrill. Who directed them? Originally, their often murky direction came directly from the intimations of the good townsfolk as instructed usually by their Christian ministers. What was their original purpose? To clean up the lawless and pacify the region. Initially, this gave their otherwise, miserable, mundane or pointless lives a higher sense of purpose. And what did they do when they cleaned up the lawless and pacified the region? Well, they either annoyed the locals who had created them with their new-found skills of violence, terror and intimidation, which had to be kept honed, or the locals had to point them at some other form of “lawlessness” they could be assigned to clean up.
Enter the Mormons. If the local ministers all said Mormons were villains, confidence men, murderers and thieves, well, Mormons were fair targets. Indeed, Mormons were not only fair game according to period Christian authorities, they were mandated by God for extinction. The “regulators,” Al Qaeda of the era, didn’t need any more direction than that.
Of course, when they ran out of Mormons, the “regulators” had to find somebody else to harass. And they did. IE: Bleeding Kansas. And don’t let me give you the impression that the whole “regulator” concept and its attendant brutality was the exclusive patent of Southern, slave-holding rednecks, hicks, and hillbillies. John Brown is the most heroic, admired, Yankee Abolitionist figure in American history for instance:
"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done."
–John Brown, statement at his sentencing on Nov. 2, 1859"[John Brown is] that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,–the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross."
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his lecture "Courage," delivered in Boston on Nov. 8, 1859http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/johnbrown/brownhome.html
The same sort of pronouncements could have been, and indeed have been, made by Joseph Smith and other great Americans concerning Smith’s own struggles against redneck pro-slave Christianity. The difference between the heroic Abolitionist John Brown and Joseph Smith the Abolitionist Mormon heretic, is Smith was fighting both the Southern Born-Again mobs, while he was also being condemned for religious conflicts set up two generations earlier by the pious Northern Abolitionist Christians as well. The latter won the war with both of the former, and thus, Mormons and Johnny Rebs have been weighed as equal villains, equal traitors to the American cause in all official histories. But just how clean were the hands of Saint John Brown the Yankee Liberator, and his heroic, patriotic Christian crusade against slavery?
Brown and the free settlers were optimistic that they could bring Kansas into the union as a slavery-free state. But in late 1855 and early 1856 it was increasingly clear to Brown that pro-slavery forces were willing to violate the rule of law in order to force Kansas to become a slave state. Brown believed that terrorism, fraud, and eventually deadly attacks became the obvious agenda of the pro-slavery supporters, then known as "Border Ruffians." After the winter snows thawed in 1856, the pro-slavery activists began a campaign to seize Kansas on their own terms. Brown was particularly affected by the Sacking of Lawrence in May 1856, in which a sheriff-led posse destroyed newspaper offices and a hotel. Only one man, a Border Ruffian, was killed. Preston Brooks‘s caning of anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner also fueled Brown’s anger. These violent acts were accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion, and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims, and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose" (quoted in Reynolds, p. 162). Brown was outraged by both the violence of the pro-slavery forces, and also by what he saw as a weak and cowardly response by the antislavery partisans and the Free State settlers, who he described as "cowards, or worse" (Reynolds pp. 163–164).
Well, so far, John Brown hasn’t discovered anything the Mormons hadn’t long ago experienced first-hand from first, his old Puritan Pals back in New England, and later from the “Border Ruffians,” who later plagued Brown. These "ruffians" of course, were the selfsame hick, pro-slave, hillbilly rednecks from Missouri, who again, for the most part, emigrated originally from the Scots-Irish Tennessee “regulator” breeding stock. And how does the sainted Mr. Protestant Martyr Brown respond to this persecution?
Sometime after 10:00 pm May 24, 1856, it is suspected they [Brown and company] took five pro-slavery settlers – James Doyle, William Doyle, Drury Doyle, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman – from their cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords. Brown later claimed he did not participate in the killings, however he did say he approved of them.
[edit]Account of the Pottawatomie Massacre by John Doyle, Son of James P. Doyle
"I, John C. Doyle, was born in Knox County, Tennessee December 19, 1838. My father, Pleasant Doyle, moved to Walker County, Ga., in 1845, moved to Chattanooga in 1848, and lived in and around Chattanooga until October 11, 1855, at which time we moved to Kansas; traveled through the country in wagons, via Nashville, Hopkinsville, Ky., St. Louis, Mo., Kansas City, Mo., then fifty miles southwest to Franklin County, Kansas, arriving there November 18, 1856. We settled on a claim of one hundred and sixty acres, built a house, and spent the winter there. In the spring of 1856 we planted a crop. Everything was quiet and peaceful until the night of May 24, when John Brown, with about twenty-five men, came to the house and demanded admittance. When refused admittance, they set fire to the house with torches made of prairie hay. To keep up all from being burned to death my father opened the door. They came in the house and handcuffed my father and my two older brothers and started to take me but my mother begged them to leave me, as I would be all the protection she would have. Brown told mother they were going to take father and the boys to the army, and left the house with them. They took them about three hundred yards from the house and murdered them. My father was shot in the head, my brothers cut to pieces. They left them all dead in a heap. They then went over two miles further to Potawatma River and killed two more men by the names of Wilkerson and Sherman. After they had killed my father and brothers, some of Brown’s men came back to our house to get our horses, but failed to find them, as we had them staked out on the prairie to graze, as that was the way we had to feed them.
In John Brown’s defense, murdering, terrorist that he is, the men he and his thugs dragged out of their homes
and chopped up at Pottowottomie, apart from their homespun agricultural activities, were also probably in the habit of riding around the countryside all night with a pack of their friends, and similarly brutalizing Abolitionists–when they weren’t lynching or horsewhipping niggers to keep them in their place. Like the Fancher Party of Mountain Meadows fame, the conception of these victims of Brown’s violence as simple, honest farmers is highly subjective. Even my characterization of them as hillbilly, rednecked hicks is something of an anachronism. In the day, mobbing Indians, perverts, and Mormons, lynching niggers, burning presses and killing Abolitionists, was a mainstream, patriotic, Christian activity. It wasn’t society’s imbeciles, the inherently violent or the idiot-cousins in the culture that were instigators of this behavior. It was rather, the very God-fearing, simple country farmers with wives and families and dreams of success in America, we keep hearing about from their defenders. That’s who the "Regulators" were at the core of it all.
Most of the politics the Mormons found themselves embroiled in during their attempted settlement of what is now the American Midwest, had less to do with Mormonism per-se, and more to do with getting them out of the way so Christianity could fight with itself. I know I’ve titled my ramblings “Religion for Mormons and other Idiots,” but even an idiot should be able to see a number of consistent themes in the way Christians abuse one-another. For all the anti-Mormon "outrages" alluded-to by the rednecked mobs, their authorizing ministers, civil officials and their lackey press, for all their bemoaning of the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, and despite
their claims of treason and rebellion, in reality, in this era, destroying presses you disagreed with politically or religiously was a common American Christian practice. And when Christians wrecked a press historically, they nearly always killed the proprietors and authors of the writings they wanted suppressed. Just like the Inquisition did. Just like Calvin did. Just like the Church of England and nearly every other State-Church did.
Christian mob-militias didn’t just innovatively start to hack up and blow the heads off men and boys, or rape and pillage Mormon settlements like Haun’s Mill, Far West, or Nauvoo because they feared a hideous Mormon threat. This wasn’t a unique, reactive modality spawned out of some extraordinarily frightening sense of Mormon imposition upon American Christian sensibilities. Christianity has been hacking and raping and torturing and slaughtering itself up for centuries, millennia. The Quincy Committee, the Nauvoo Committee, the Mob Manifesto authors, these Christian “patriots” didn’t just put together their own “Secret Constitutions,” out of a singlular desperation to justify ignoring the law, reason, and common sense to achieve their political and social dominance. There is nothing unique at all in this pattern of Christian oppression, in the New World or the Old, in Roman Catholic circles or Protestant. Even John Brown, the "enlightened" Abolitionist, Yankee “good guy” drafted up a “Provisional Constitution” to ennoble his rebellion and butchery. That’s what Christians do. That’s a system of belief exposing its true nature for two-thousand years now.
But what do Mormons believe in this regard you may ask? And well you may. It’s almost as if I was leading you up to this:
…But if any man is authorized to take away my life because he says I am a false teacher, then upon the same principle I am authorized to take away the life of every false teacher, and where would be the end of blood? And who would not be the sufferer? But no man is authorized to take away life because of a difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate, right or wrong….
Do not insult your own intelligence as well as mine by refusing to admit by now that apart from the claim of heresy, the whole Mormon
era from Missouri to the Civil War, was politically dominated by a rather different religious question. One faction of Christianity believed the Bible had cursed the negro to an eternity of slavery, and another faction of Christianity determined that the Bible decreed slavery to be a primitive and barbaric practice. This was not in essence a political argument, except insofar as both Christian factions declared themselves to be the exclusive interpreters of both Biblical and Constitutional dogma, and that all other religious or political views were therefore detrimental to a pure Christian State in America. This is no more or less than warring Christian factions have always done. In this argument, while Joseph Smith was clearly an Abolitionist, by also claiming to be a prophet, his social and political righteousness earned the Latter-day Saints no friends on either side of this pressing American question. Mormonism was simply in the road, the common enemy of all, so and thus both the regressive, ignorant, Bible-thumping, slave-whipping rednecks, and the pious, "enlightened" educated, Beattitudinal Yankees hit Mormonism with everything they had. The Mormon wars were essentially but a practice run for a bigger and better war these American Christian factions already had festering between themselves, already impatiently pencilled in at the back of their Manifest Destiny planning schedule.
One cannot concede that Abolitionist, Northern, American Christianity–led first by the Whigs and then the new Republican Party, was any kinder to Mormonism than Southern, pro-slavery Christianity–led by the Democrat Party. It was however, the extreme, daily, misfortune of the Latter-day Saints to find that it was the latter, coarser, less-sophisticated branch of their Christian persecutors that they constantly found themselves rubbing community elbows with. And even after finding something of a haven for themselves in Utah, eventually the worst of the Appalachian rednecks, first in the form of Baptist and Methodist reformers who followed the US invasion forces into the Territory, and then in the form of three generational incarnations of the KKK, all spun from East Tennessee’s “regulator” heritage, who likewise migrated themselves and their ideologies all the way to Utah, and again listed Mormonism as their worst enemy, and again did their best to incriminate, irritate, and hopefully eradicate Mormonism.
As a persecuted minority, it’s today far easier for Mormonism to institutionally euphemize its persecutors into
some nameless, generically evil, faceless mob. The devil made them do it. Satan hardened their hearts. That way Mormons can still pretend they’re all brothers and sisters in Christ with their contemporary “Christian” neighbors. For their part however, their Christian neighbors will only believe this if for some fluke reason they posses a shred of inherent inspiration and enlightenment from Christ Himself. Any good will and brotherhood from that source however, will vanish in a puff of dogma the second they are corrected by their “orthodox” Christian clergies. None of the essential Christian sects and doctrines have so centrally changed their core beliefs since their days of indiscriminately killing off opponents, that they don’t still count Mormons as Godless heretics and Satanic pawns—and this at a minimum. That rhetoric may be embarrassing to mainstream Christians today, but it remains essential Christian orthodoxy. In 1844 it was the common language of the pulpit and press. The day after the Expositor was destroyed by Nauvoo’s city council, this is the Christian response, drafted at the very first preliminary meeting of Christian civic leadership on the news, before any clear facts had been established:
Resolved…that we hold ourselves at all times in readiness to cooperate with our fellow citizens in this state, Missouri, and Iowa, to exterminate – UTTERLY EXTERMINATE, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles.
Resolved…that the time, in our opinion, has arrived when the adherents of Smith as a body, shall be driven from the surrounding settlements into Nauvoo; that the Prophet and his miscreant adherents should be demanded at their hands, and if not surrendered, A WAR OF EXTERMINATION SHOULD BE WAGED, To the entire destruction if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
This is an honest, heartfelt, unapologetic, naked and untempered Christian demand for immediate, heretical Mormon blood–through any means and at any cost to law and society. This is the Christian mission statement that anti-Mormonists will never show you. This is the Christian charter that killed Joseph Smith. And for what? Was it prompted by some overt, impending, even if reciprocal Mormon threat? Was it because Joseph Smith, like the heroic, famed crusader for human liberty, the Christian Yankee Abolitionist John Brown, 
took a few "regulators" to the homes of his nearest political antagonists, dragged them off, shot them in the head, hacked them to pieces, and then left the bodies piled in a heap at the end of the driveway for their victims’ surviving wives and children to deal with? Or, if Christianity now declares Joseph Smith devilish and evil for discretely taking more than one woman to bed–as if this was ever anyone’s business but his own and that of the women who willingly shared his nocturnal companionship–was even this the excuse raised for his assassination? No, by their own admission, the Christian lynch mob that killed Joseph Smith did so as a reply to a disputed Nauvoo City Council decision concerning the operation of a printing press.
Those with any insight at all will immediately recognize in anti-Mormonism, all the key historically Christian rhetoric and stereotypical charges hurled against the Jews throughout their history of persecution: wicked, bloodthirsty, monopolizing all the goodies, keep to themselves, cheat the Gentiles, out to kill Christians and take their stuff, out to steal women, drink the blood of infants and virgins in Satanic secret rituals, bla bla bla…
The “orthodox” or “Historical” Christian political agenda screams from the media still today, even if largely muzzled and tamed out of necessity in "mainstream" congregations by a higher level of public enlightenment than in Joseph Smith’s day. But at the end of the day, it was the victorious, Yankee Calvinists who won their last bloody laugh, first at the Southern redneck slave-holders, and when those Godless Rebel bastards had been put in their place, they turned finally back to the Mormons they rediscovered hiding from their pious wrath out in Utah. The Rebel hillbillies we all know, got their comeuppance at the end of a massive national military battle the Yankee victors now call the "Civil War." The Mormons, well, the forces of "enlightened" Christianity finally found a way to beat them into humility as well. It took patience and finesse, but eventually they did with the stroke of a pen what they had failed to do from Palmyra to Salt Lake City by fire and sword.
And now the game is well afoot. On to Utah. in the words of the late-great Irish Republican Army: Do and say nothing ‘till you hear more.
Mormon Wars Part 2: Prelude to a Storm
There were several Mormon Wars. They all arose at the point where local Christian clergies competing unsuccessfully with Mormonism, sold their congregations and attendant, backslidden community rabble, on the proposition that Mormons were aiming to take over and supersede their God-given, inalienable rights as American Christians. The Mormons it was claimed, in each of these cases, would then enforce their own morality instead of state and federal law and authority. They would allow only their own to do business or prosper. Naturally, this is how the professional Christian clergy would have seen the situation, since that is exactly what they intended to do, and ultimately did.
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/themes/problem.html
In Missouri, The Mormon War of 1838, the main problem was simply that Mormons were on the verge of out-voting old Christian settlers. Fistfights broke out as old Christian settlers tried to drive Mormons from the polls. The Mormons slugged their way in to vote anyway. The Christians came back with guns. The Mormons also had guns. The Mormons were better shots and the old Christian settlers cried “rebellion” to the governor. The governor issued an order of extermination. A storm of Mormon-killing ensued.
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/danites_p8.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2600286/posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/history/danites_eom.htm
In Nauvoo Illinois, the Mormon War of 1844, Joseph Smith and the city council ordered a small portion of the city’s defense forces to destroy an anti-Mormon printing press, the Nauvoo Expositor, that had set up under their noses. Anti-Mormonists seldom mention that its operators, along with some valid “inside” exposure of legitimately alarming doctrinal developments centered around plural marriage, were transparently using this claim to journalism and a dedication to “truth” as a pretext for rather a lot of base name-calling and bold, inflammatory assertion that Joseph Smith was the devil incarnate and a bloodthirsty murderer. The paper’s content was fueled by
excommunicated Mormons, many of whom had sought and gained some sort of 
privileged status amongst Joseph Smith’s organization, and had then taken improper liberties with that status–sexual, financial, and at various times, as did Sampson Avard, via organizing secret vigilante sub-groups to defend and avenge the Saints, which they then claimed had been authorized by Smith himself. After excommunication, I repeat, only after excommunication–an excommunication that each and all of them begged to avoid amid great public confession–several, like William Law, attempted to start their own churches, and others, like the allegedly syphilitic Francis Higbee, his randy brother Chauncy, or the ex-Mayor William Bennett, former Methodist minister, university founder, abortionist, and all-‘round manipulative sociopath, soon abandoned splitting off their own religious empires from Joe Smith’s flock, dove headlong into the anti-Mormon business, and after some success with a lecture-circuit, intended to fully monetize their Joe-Smith pay-back enterprises with the Nauvoo Expositor. And just to rub Joe’s nose in it, they set up right downtown Nauvoo. Sampson Avard became a star witness in subsequent hearings after Joseph Smith’s assassination, maintaining a brief celebrity by inventing tales of the fanciful “Danite” bands of conspiratorial marauders that became the subjects of dime novels for generations, and remain a staple of anti-Mormonism today.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Governor Thomas Ford, in his history of Illinois, styles Bennett “probably the greatest scamp in the western country.” But this was not until long after the Mormons, thrice victimized, had become aware of his villainy.
The Nauvoo Expositor published exactly one edition before the new Mayor Smith and his city council fell for the bait, and did exactly what the Expositor’s owners probably wanted them to do. They condemned and destroyed the press as a public nuisance. This was admittedly a marginal end-run around the First Amendment.
http://restorationbookstore.org/articles/nopoligamy/jsfp-vol1/chp11.htm
When anti-Mormon riots broke out all over the county in protest, Smith called out the city’s state-chartered militia to defend the town’s interests. This too, was probably the anti-Mormon coalition’s hoped-for reaction. Unfortunately for Smith, by then the mobs were made up in good part by the Illinois State Militia from Carthage and elsewhere, and mobbers from Missouri and Iowa who had been rallied by the anti-Mormon press of another regional rabble-rouser, Thomas Sharp, of the Warsaw Signal. 
The Expositor’s cadre of wounded parties maintained that Smith’s use of the Legion to destroy the press constituted a riot and wanted His Honor the Mayor criminally indicted for inciting it. They claimed the use of the Legion to destroy a press, and prevent its owners from defending it was treasonous, and in fact, when the anti-Mormon Mob/Militia hit Nauvoo, they maintained that declaring martial law in response to this incursion was treasonous, because at least some element of the murderous throng was there on official state business. In spite of several local court hearings and dismissals of the matter, the Expositor’s defenders then claimed Smith had overthrown all civil law by force of the Legion and cried to Thomas Ford, the governor. The Warsaw Signal broadcast these inflated charges throughout the region, and eventually the nation.
- It should be the firm determination of every one holding in veneration the institutions of the country, upon the first outrage against a citizen of this county, to give those “Latter-day Devils,” a scathing that will eclipse the “Missouri Persecutions,” or in other words, Missouri Justice.
- …Yes Joe! we have that confidence in your saintship, that we do not believe that the concentrated extract of all the abominations of the Infernal Regions, can add one stain to the blackness of your character. Look in a mirror Joe and you will see the reflection of the most detestable wretch that the earth contains.
In advocating force, Sharp appealed to the primitive law of communal self-defense that had authorized mob actions from the Revolution to the killing of the abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, ironically the same principle underlying the wrecking of the Expositor. The theory that a community had the right to enforce its will against impending danger had authorized vigilantism and lynchings in one community after another in every section of the nation. Relying on it to make his case, Sharp was sure of support when on June 12 he called for Joseph’s assassination and the extermination of the Mormons.
–Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
By Richard Lyman Bushman, Jed Woodworth
Ford was faced with a state-wide revolt by the anti-Mormon factions, and persuaded 
Smith to surrender himself and disarm the Legion while he investigated the validity of the charge of inciting to riot. When they showed up in nearby, allegedly neutral ground in Carthage to surrender, they were instead charged with treason.
The same State Militia that the governor had called in to keep order and protect the prisoners, the fiercely anti-Mormon Carthage Greys, had joined forces with the Mormon-hating Warsaw Regulators, and other travelling mobs like the one known as “Moses’ Fire Insurance Company,” famed for burning out Mormons, and had openly sworn to kill Smith for sure this time. Having been repeatedly warned of these threats, governor Ford brushed off the danger, and left Carthage to further “investigate” the situation, saying “The people are not that cruel.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ford_(politician)
As soon as the governor and his personal force was out of town, rather than wait for a hearing, the mob-militia coalition stormed the jail dressed as Indians, and shot Joseph Smith and his brother down like dogs. In a few days, after it appeared there would be no retaliation from the Mormons, the mob then progressed to assaulting Mormon out-settlements, and eventually besieged Nauvoo, culminating in a full militia cannon assault. Other factions of the State Militia, apparently still loyal to the state and national constitutions, sided with the Mormons and helped defend the city. It didn’t end well for the Mormons however, and they eventually were driven from the state in the dead of winter, landing in Utah at the end of a white man’s trail of tears 
not unlike the original Native American version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nauvoo,_Illinois
The state of Illinois officially apologized for its treatment of the Mormons in 2004. This is particularly since later investigation proved that the fatal shots had almost certainly been inflicted upon Joseph Smith by the Carthage Greys, his State Militia guards. Missouri issued an official apology in 1976. Christian excuse-makers however, are still unwilling to concede any culpability in the matter. Many Christian ministries are dedicated specifically to rationalizing both the Missouri extermination order, the expulsion from Illinois, and of course, the last and most significant of these anti-Mormon melees, these military and para-military engagements between Christian crusaders and Mormon defenders, the Armageddon of Mormon Wars, the Utah Mormon War of 1857.
http://contenderministries.org/mormonism/illinoisevents.php
http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/_PDFArchives/apologetics/AP1W0604.pdf
http://www.rickross.com/reference/mormon/mormon320.html
http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/u/UTAHWAR.html
http://frontierhistory.blogspot.com/2008/07/thomas-leiper-kane-utah-mormon-war-of.html
http://solomonspalding.com/docs/exposit1.htm
In 1847, Brigham Young succeeded the assassinated Joseph Smith and fled the raging, armed extermination effort centered around the then premier Mormon metropolis, Nauvoo Illinois. He landed in the Utah Valley and in ten years had built a major city in the desert, and an entirely self-sufficient greater community all around the Great Basin and Intermountain West. (Las Vegas was originally a Mormon supply stop for example.)
Originally, Young formed a provisional State of Deseret, out of a large portion of disput
ed, and mostly abandoned Mexican territory. (The Mormons had in fact been enlisted by the US government to form an army battalion, the “Mormon Battalion” to defend US interests in the disputed region and win the area for the United States.) Young’s long-term plan was to apply for US statehood and almost immediately made applications for same. Allowing Mormons majority control over their own state however, a state blocking a strategic corridor connecting the new east and west coasts, was seen by Congress to be extremely undesirable. Young however, believed that under Constitutional law statehood would allow them great autonomy and protection from further Christian persecution. Instead, Congress created Utah Territory, which could then be administered directly by Congress, particularly regarding appointing governors and other high officers.
http://www.mormonbattalion.com/Armyofthewest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Battalion
Mormons wanted a state, they wanted autonomy. But the Mormons took what they could get, and Utah Territory was formed. Mormonism adapted to and overcame the desert, and spread itself out along supply and support lines from one end of the country to the other.
As much as Christian settlers from Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and points east, all claimed they wanted nothing to do with Mormonism, no sooner had the Mormons opened up the Intermountain West, than the same hick Bible-thumpers who were ready to fight Mormonism to the death in Missouri or Illinois, the same bare-footed yokels who drove Mormonism out of the Midwest, were loading up their guns and Bibles into wagons and following the Mormons out to Utah. They also seemed keen to check out that gold discovery two members of the Mormon Battalion found in California at Sutter’s Mill, while taking a break after their hitch in the army. The Baptists and Methodists in particular, Mormonism’s old friends from Missouri, made it an official point to recruit good Christian armies of missionary invasion and help them emigrate to Utah, California, Nevada, anywhere the Mormons settled, to secure the territory for Jesus.
Ten years into Mormonism’s taming of the wilderness in their Utah hideout, the goal of Mormonism’s Christian enemies back in Washington had evolved into a frantic effort to prevent Mormonism from gaining the slightest toe-hold anywhere in the nation. The entire continent had to be kept safe for Christianity.
Political, military, and cultural hostilities erupted in 1857-58 when President James Buchanan
fulfilled an 1855-56 campaign promise to suppress Mormons and sent the United States military to occupy Utah in what is now known as the “Utah War.” Mormons regarded this as a violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [which had formed the territory out of Mexican land] and an attempt to renew the campaign of violence against Mormons that had occurred in Missouri and Illinois. Mormons felt that they no longer had anywhere new to migrate, and that they had to stand their ground. It was during this period, on September 11, 1857, that a controversial incident known as the “Mountain Meadow Massacre” occurred in which some resentful Mormons and Piute Indians killed a group of civilian settlers passing from Arkansas to California via Utah.
Most movers and shakers in American politics pandered to rabid Christian constituencies like the Temperance Movement only because they could still get a drink in any backroom gin joint they wanted anyway. But looking pro-Temperance automatically gained them the massively organized WASP Temperance vote. So too, in their days of glory, did pandering to the anti-Mormonists gain you a similarly solid block of votes, essentially the same block of votes as the Temperance vote, whatever your personal feelings on Mormonism might actually be. In any case, there was
money to be made in Utah. There were contracts and infrastructure the Mormons would otherwise use to benefit themselves and build their own powerbase. Politicians and military leaders found that falling into the company of the good Christian forces of anti-Mormonism, humoring them, giving them what they wanted, was a sure-fire promotion and vote-getter.
For the Yankee, Abolitionist, Christian vote-getter, there was the Republican Party, founded on the platform that it would abolish the “Twin Relics of Barbarism: Slavery and Polygamy.” James Buchanan was a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies called a “doughface” in period slang. Democrats courted Southern and States-Rights Christians by also swearing to eradicate the Mormon blight immediately upon election. The slavery issue could wait they said. They were also promising the Ozark/Appalachian rabble in the east, free land in the opening west.
The closest rival to the dominant Democrat Party at the time was the “Know Nothing” party, alternately called the “American Republican Party,” the “Native American Party,” and “American Party,” the “Know Nothing nickname referring to a secret-society contingent to said party. The “Know Nothings” were formed at the collapse of the old Whig Party, as by then long-established American-born Protestants sounded the call to stop the immigration and infiltration of American Protestant purity by German and Irish Roman Catholics. The party culminated itself in a number of acts of anti-Catholic violence, sabotage and riots back east, and then split apart over the slavery issue, sending pro-slave Protestant Nativists to the Democrats, and Abolitionist Protestant Nativists to the new Republican Party.
For all of these dominant parties and political orientations, the Mormons fulfilled every qualification of the perfect boogeyman. They had a Pope-like prophet. They had secret vengeance societies-or so it was claimed by their defectors. They were taking all the free land out west and claiming they’d have it all eventually, for their private Zion. For the Nativists, Mormons were mass-recruiting foreigners to immigrate. For the pro-slave Southern hicks they were all just a bunch of smartassed Yankee Abolitionists. For the pious North and South, they weren’t Christians, and they weren’t even Catholics. They weren’t even that close to being acceptable American citizens.
The problem was, Mormons had become a huge voting block as well. Pleasing the Mormons gave you an election in their areas. For a while, the Whig party played the anti-Mormon card, and Democrats toyed with their affections. When the Mormons did not prove reliable, when candidates had to deal individually with each Mormon community issue-by-issue, when Joseph Smith formed his own presidential candidacy, and pledged the Mormons would only support their friends of whatever party, the decision was taken to simply eliminate the Mormon puzzle from the political equation rather than attempt to court this fickle, if substantial, group of unreliable constituents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Republican_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
http://kaystreet.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/a-brief-history-of-intolerance-in-america/
President James Buchanan was a Presbyterian from Pennsylvania, a founding stronghold of the Know Nothings, and member of the first sect to become a sworn enemy of Joseph Smith and his Mormon church from its earliest days in the “Burned Over District” of New York’s revival era. He had his nose firmly suckled into the butt-cheeks of both the Southern pro-slavery and the anti-Mormon Movements. He’s also often cited in lists of the top-ten worst US presidents:
In his inaugural speech, Buchanan stated that the slavery issue was of “little practical importance” because the Supreme Court was about to settle it. Two days later they announced the Dred Scott decision in which it ruled that people of African descent, whether or not they were slaves, could never be citizens of the United States, and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. Buchanan was widely believed to have been personally involved in the outcome of the case. Additionally, Buchanan’s administration was troubled by the Panic of 1857 – a sudden downturn in the US economy. Before Buchanan left office, seven slave states seceded, the Confederacy was formed, all arsenals and forts in the seceded states were lost (except Fort Sumter and two remote ones), and a fourth of all federal soldiers surrendered to Texas troops. Historians in 2006 voted his failure to deal with secession the worst presidential mistake ever made.
Under previous president Pierce, one of the throng of good Christian profiteers to seek his cash-cow in Utah
Territory, was a man named McGraw. WMF McGraw had been awarded the mail contract for the Territory, but apparently wasn’t very reliable or swift in his postal obligations. He’d hoped to make the line profitable from passenger trade, but Brigham Young as governor and head of the Mormon church, already had a superior personnel transport and supply line set up in all directions to facilitate the ongoing Mormon emigration, supply, and construction efforts. Young concluded McGraw’s contract was a waste of time and money and awarded the new mail contract to fellow Mormons who were already engaged in the far more developed and reliable Mormon transportation efforts.
Most federal appointees got along well with Governor Young and Mormon society. But McGraw went screaming back to Washington as part of a small coven of partisan officials and others had gone to Utah either to get rich, or under the intention of heeling Brigham Young and his Mormon heretics to become the faithful dogs of American Christian rule. All of these disaffected parties were particularly upset that period Mormons lived as an almost socialist community, dealt generously and forgivingly with their brethren, and yet stuck it to the Gentiles at every opportunity like capitalist bastards. (As opposed to the current Mormon culture in which BYU cranks out hundreds of Mormon MBA’s every year, each of which makes it his goal to see just how much cash he can screw out of the faithful all along the Wasatch Front, so he can build the biggest house on the highest bench in Provo.) Much of the offence federal officers in Utah Territory took from trying to rule a bunch of Mormons, came down to Brigham Young’s flock cramping their style in the grafting, drinking, and whoring departments. Even today, grafting, drinking, and whoring are still considered in some camps to be principal benefits of any high office, but back then, it was a way of life. As a result of this combined, sudden flurry of complaints, President Pierce nullified the Mormon contract and effectively cut off all communication to and from the territory as a result.
According to LDS historians James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, the most influential information came from William W. Drummond, an associate justice of the Utah territorial supreme court who began serving in 1854. Drummond’s letter of resignation of March 30, 1857 contained charges that Young’s power set aside the rule of law in the territory, that the Mormons had ignored the laws of Congress and the Constitution, and that male Mormons acknowledged no law but the priesthood.
- He further charged the Church with murder, destruction of federal court records, harassment of federal officers, and slandering the federal government. He concluded by urging the president to appoint a governor who was not a member of the Church and to send with him sufficient military aid to enforce his rule.[24]
This account was further supported by Territorial Chief Justice Kinney in reports to Washington, where he recited examples of what he believed to be Brigham Young’s perversion of Utah’s judicial system and further urged his removal from office and the establishment of a one-regiment U.S. Army garrison in the territory.[25]
There were further charges of treason, battery, theft, and fraud made by other officials including Federal Surveyors,[26] and Federal Indian Agents.[27]
Furniss states that most federal reports from Utah to Washington “left unclear whether the [Mormons] habitually kicked their dogs; otherwise their calendar of infamy in Utah was complete.”[28]
Fulfilling his campaign promises, newly elected president James Buchanan eagerly embraced the opportunity
to send a large army out to suppress this imagined rebellion, and Congress appointed a new Christian governor, Alfred Cumming, who travelled with the army, presuming that he would have to be installed by force of arms. This little adventure became known as “Buchanan’s Blunder.” It ultimately bankrupted the national treasury and after only a few years of debauched army occupation of Mormon country, circumstances found Andrew Johnston 
and a lot of his troops and officers, seceding from the Union and making war upon the Constitution wholesale, leaving the North entirely broke and poorly able to meet the Southern rebellion.
Johnston died at the battle of Shiloh in 1862, a Confederate officer.
As a new president, Abraham Lincoln found himself the sole defender of the Constitution and this effort crippled by 40 million dollars of pointless Utah War debt, an unheard of sum at the time. Most of it was squandered on pay, feed, contracts and whorehouses intended to keep the Christian forces of civilization in the Utah Expedition comfortable. When the Union needed troops immediately along the Potomac at the outbreak of civil war, most of the Union army was bivouacked in Cedar Valley Utah, exiled to that remote wasteland southwest of Salt Lake City by mutual agreement of Brigham Young and the new Christian governor Cumming to keep the army and its accompanying rabble out of town.
In Camp Floyd, near present-day Fairfield and Cedar Fort, Johnston’s army immediately built their own camp-follower subdivision of whorehouses, gambling dens and taverns, called ” Frog Town.” Brigham Young complained that before the Christian forces of “civilization” had invaded them, there hadn’t been a single murder and scarcely a violent crime in the territory for ten years, and since the Christian invasion, they were dealing with multiple fights, shootings, theft, robbery and other crimes almost daily.
When Lincoln recalled the Utah Expedition, a good portion of his troops took the free ride back east and the
n deserted immediately to fight for the Confederacy. The Utah Expedition was in short, a major boondoggle. There were no military engagements. Brigham Young welcomed the new governor openly and immediately. The army on the other hand, was bottled up and harassed all winter in a hellishly cold canyon while Mormon guerrillas burned their supply wagons, scattered their livestock, and cut them off from all communications. After protracted negotiation they were allowed to enter the valley, but only to pass through—to be forced to camp in a rocky back-valley fifty miles away from Salt Lake City. Nothing much else happened until the Civil War broke out. After some three years and nearly forty-million dollars, Johnston’s Army had succeeded only in bringing Utah Territory its first whorehouse, a string of grog shops, and a jail.
All the comforts of Christian society.
On June 19, the New York Herald summarized the non-engagement: “Killed, none; wounded, none; fooled, everybody.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/brink-of-war.html#ixzz1bRrYTvoZ
http://frontierhistory.blogspot.com/2008/07/thomas-leiper-kane-utah-mormon-war-of.html
In 1857, as Andrew Johnston’s army was marching on Utah to make its Mormon population submit to Christian Biblical convention and political rule, the Mormon and Native American victims of years of bigoted American Christian persecution, converged at a place called “Mountain Meadows” to have it out with what they perceived to be a company of American Christian bigots who had declared war on them. This culminated in one-hundred and twenty allegedly docile and innocent Christians being shot, speared, and beaten to death by a group of Indians and Mormons who had apparently finally taken just about enough of their crap. That’s the short explanation. But brevity isn’t everything. I’ll elaborate.
In the first Mormon War of 1838, most Christian apologists openly confess that Christian forces in Missouri and Illinois authored a “Secret Constitution,” or “Mob Manifesto” in which they openly declared a war of extermination on Mormonism. They contend however, that Mormons also issued a declaration of war on Christianity. This is popularly confused with the “Salt Sermon,” which actually only compared apostate Mormons to salt that has lost its savor, and ominously invited apostates to stop making trouble for the church and find somewhere else to live. The speech actually in question, was delivered on July 4th, 1838, and anti-Mormon forces use it to this day as an excuse for Missouri Governor Lilburn W Boggs’ “Extermination Order,” issued months later in the same year. The chronology of course is backwards, and Christian apologists always neglect to mention the many expressions of inspiring, patriotic tribute to the United States Constitution that precede the one paragraph or two they always quote from this so-called Mormon “declaration of war”:
In celebrating this, the anniversary of our independence, all party distinctions should be forgotten, all religious differences should be laid aside. We are members of one common republic, equally dependent on a faithful execution of its laws, for our protection, in the enjoyment of our civil, political, and religious privileges. All have a common interest in the preservation of the Union, and in defense and support of the constitution. Northern, southern, and western interests, ought to be forgotten, or lost for the time being, in the more noble desire to preserve the nation, as one whole; for on this depends the security of all local and sectional interest; for if we cannot preserve them by supporting the Union, we cannot by rending it in pieces. In the former there is hope, in the latter fear, in one peace, in the other war.
…
All attempts, on the part of religious aspirants, to unite church and state, ought to be repealed with indignation, and every religious society supported in its rights, and in the exercise of its conscientious devotions. The Mohameden, the Pagan, and the Idolater, not excepted, and be partakers equally, in the benefits of the government. For if the Union is preserved, it will be by endearing the people to it; and this can only be done by securing to all their most sacred rights. The least deviation, from the strictest rule of right, on the part of any portion of the people, or their public servants, will create dissatisfaction, that dissatisfaction will end in strife, strife in war, and war, in the dissolution of the Union.
…
Next to the worship of our God, we esteem the education of our children and of the rising generation. For what is wealth without society, or society without intelligence. And how is intelligence to be obtained?–by education. It is that which forms the youthful mind: it is that alone, which renders society agreeable, and adds interest and importance, to the worship of God. What is religion without intelligence!–an empty sound. Intelligence is the root, from which all true enjoyments flow. Intelligence is religion, and religion is intelligence, if it is any thing. Take intelligence from it, and what is left? a name–a sound without meaning. If a person desires to be truly pious in the sight of God, he must be purely intelligent. Piety without intelligence, is fanaticism, and devotion without understanding, is enthusiasm.
[A not very subtle jab at the fundamentalist hicks and apostates persecuting them.]
…
We take God and all the holy angels to witness this day, that we warn all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come on us no more forever, for from this hour, we will bear it no more, our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man or the set of men, who attempts it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seal of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed. –Remember it then all MEN.
We will never be the aggressors, we will infringe on the rights of no people; but shall stand for our own until death. We claim our own rights, and are willing that all others shall enjoy theirs.
(Emphasis is mine.)
This sermon was delivered by Sidney Rigdon, First Counselor in the LDS presidency, and authorized by Joseph Smith, its primary author. There is in fact, nothing whatsoever in it that implies disloyalty to Constitutional law or the United States. There is nothing whatsoever in this that suggests anything other than a commitment to “no longer tamely submit” to lawless persecution. This we are told by Mormon critics, was authored and presented as gospel to the general LDS membership directly by the LDS First Presidency in the name of founding prophet Joseph Smith, on the Fourth of July, 1838. How then, some twenty years later, had this same organization’s leaders changed their minds entirely about their patriotic and political orientation? How is it that in 1857, Brigham Young suddenly figured it would be a smart thing to have some Mormon assassins pop out to Mountain Meadows and randomly slaughter a wagon train full of peaceful Christian travellers just for the hell of it?
Well, this makes perfect sense to the Christian bigot, because this is what Christian ministers of the day, and even of this day, thought, and still think of Mormonism:
The Monstrosity of Mormonism
Lyman Whitney Allan, DD, Newark NJ
The Assembly herald, Volume 10
By Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly
Mormonism is a monstrosity. It is a fungus growth upon civilization. It is a gross externalism, a horrible abnormalism. It never developed from roots deep in the trend of the Christian centuries. It started, in its degenerate individualism, forth and up from the pit. It began down in the blackness an isolated phenomenon. It bears the features of satanic parentage. It is Beelzebub’s offspring. By its fruit we know it, and its fruits have been blood and shame.
We make no apology for this characterization. History is history. A half century of time confirms what we have uttered. The apology for fifty years of infamous history rests with the Mormon hierarchy.
…
It is grossly foolish to lighten or to gloss over modern Mormonism by endeavoring to forget and eliminate its past. Mormonism and murder stand together. We appeal to the Mountain Meadow massacre and the bloodshed of “destroying angels.” Mormonism and sensualism are linked indissolubly…
Mormonism is the foe of the individual. What can the character of the individual Mormon be who is taught that sinful Adam is the only God with which he has to do, that it is good to slay the body to save the soul, and adultery is a means of grace? What can the character of the family be when the wife and the mother, whom God intended to be the purifying, uplifting and divine influence in the home, is to all intents and purposes a prostitute?…
Polygamy is only another name for moral leprosy…
…
…Mormonism has doubled its adherents in twelve years. Four hundred thousand people in this country claim allegiance to Mormonism, and they are people who are in some way so sinewy in spirit and body as to have transformed a desert and to have gotten the dominating political power in several States and to have constructed, as Professor Ely has remarked, “the most perfect piece of social mechanism with which I have ever in any way come in contact, excepting alone in the German army.”
…
I have had a Mormon elder in my home and been face to face with his sophistries. I have hurled the truth at Mormon elders from my pulpit, and the effect upon them was absolutely nothing. Neither excited nor touched, they went forward with the same hypocritic non-chalance to perpetuate and extend the aggressiveness of the Mormon machine.
We have made mistakes. We have admitted Utah as a State. The error is evident. It must be corrected. How? Cannot the Christian Church all over the land influence the emigration of Christian men and women to “Mormonized” territories? The preponderance of a Christian population will solve the Mormon problem. The Church must keep an eagle eye upon our Congress. it must not permit action favorable to Mormonism.
No, it’s not recent rhetoric from the Religious Right about Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy. But it might as well be. The Christian assumption of Constitutional and political right to rule is as clearly seen in the above criticism of the first elected Utah State Mormon Senator, Reed Smoot, in 1903, as it was in the 1838 Mob Manifesto:
We, the undersigned, citizens Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society, in consequence a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our County, styling themselves “Mormons;” and intending, as we do, two we are society, “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,” and believing as we do, that the arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one against the evils which are now inflicted upon us, and seem to be increasing, by the said religious sect, deem it expedient, and of the highest importance, to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose — a purpose which we deem it almost superfluous to say, is justified as well by the law of nature, as by the law of self-preservation.
If we fairly judge the history of Mormon patriotic expression, we clearly see a consistent deference to the
rights of all religious orders and beliefs, and a strong support for all political and religious orientations as guaranteed in the US Constitution. Christian utterances along political lines on the other hand, consistently assume that America is theirs by God’s ordination and Constitutional mandate. The emphasis above, is mine, but note that the Christian Secret Constitution, or Mob Manifesto, was authored by all the noted Christian clergy of the region, as well as many civil officers with whom they fellowshipped. It was not, as is claimed, in reaction to Rigdon’s “Salt Sermon,” or even the LDS Presidency’s 4th of July address. Rigdon’s Independence Day declaration could have been authored 
by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Ben Franklin. The Mob Manifesto in contrast, is a sinister, Christian Nation response to the LDS church’s publication of an article that implied an invitation to free negroes to emigrate to Missouri and join the Mormons.
Contrary to the delusions of Christian, moral-equivalency pretenders, the old Christian settlers of Missouri declared a war of extermination on the Latter-day Saints because they refused to let a bunch of nigger-
loving Mormons continue to build a thriving, free society that would crush their aspirations to build slave-powered mansions on cheap western farmland. Yes, that’s how they really put it. That’s how Christianity really justified the Missouri extermination order. That’s the unsanitized version.
But more than that, anti-Mormonists would like you to ignore period neutral evidence that suggests the Mormons had repeatedly appealed from the very start of their troubles in the state, to then Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin, through a team of lawyers and had tried again and again to resolve matters peacefully. The truth is, mob violence against Mormons in Missouri commenced in 1833 when it was realized and circulated through Christian journals that Mormons had reached majority in Jackson County and would soon command all of its affairs by simple domination of the ballot box:
- From the 31st of October until the 4th of November [1833], there was one continual scene of outrages of the most hideous kind. the mob collected in different parts of the county and attacked the Saints in most of their settlements, houses were unroofed, others were pulled down, leaving women and children, and even the sick and the dying exposed to the inclemency of the weather. Men were caught and whipped or clubbed until they were bruised from head to foot, and some were left upon the ground for dead. The most horrid threats and imprecations were uttered against us, and women and children were told, with cursings, that unless they left the country immediately they should be killed.
Never pacifistic, the Mormons vowed to fight back. And they did on November 4 when the Saints and the Missourians fought a ruinous skirmish on the eastern side of the Blue River. One Mormon and two Missourians died in the fighting and several received injuries.
Because of this battle Missouri militia Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pitcher, also a respected Independence business leader, went with troops on November 5, 1833, to the main Mormon settlements and forced the Mormons to give up their arms. Within a short time twelve hundred Mormons began leaving the county, now having no way to protect themselves.
–Alexander Doniphan, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate
The Mormons dragged their mounting civil and criminal cases against their persecutors through the courts as 
advised by their governor, while Dunklin pretended to be helpless to do more. This only incited the Old Christian Mobs to move into the adjoining counties where the Mormons had fled, to again loot, pillage, burn, and brutally destroy their homes and possessions, because it was thus clear the Mormons intended to stay and fight rather than run off as instructed by the Christian settlers.
By the time Mormonism attempted to vote at Gallatin, the start of the Mormon War of 1838, they had been through at least three counties and two governors attempting to settle their grievances in the courts and via the several police and security agents of the state. The newly elected governor Lilburn W Boggs was likewise appealed to for the protection of their persons, their property, and their civil rights. Naturally, today’s Christian apologists won’t tell you that his only reply was, that the state had wasted enough time and money defending the Mormons, and the warring parties would just have to fight it out amongst themselves.
Governor Ford of Illinois, when forced to make the hard choice of enforcing his Constitutionally demanded duty to protect the Mormons at the expense of his popular constituency, later essentially concurred with Boggs’ sentiment:
Men engaged in unpopular projects expect more protection from the laws than the laws are able to furnish in the face of popular excitement.
Anti-Mormonists keep insisting that Mormons got what they had coming in Missouri for burning down the polling town of Gallatin. They always forget to mention that Christian mobs had refused them their legal franchise to vote and physically assaulted them as they approached the polling place, which is what actually commenced the warfare. They also forget to mention that the thus offended Mormons burned Gallatin not only because they were being denied the right to vote there, but because the same parties attempting to drive them from the polls at Gallatin had been involved in burning most of them out of the counties next door some months previously.
Historian Richard L. Anderson concludes that Governor Boggs’s extermination order in Missouri was a fourth use, not the first, of a “remove-or-be-exterminated” policy employed by an aggressive,
northwestern Missouri, anti-Mormon political faction. By then, the Latter-day Saints had been forced from counties three times—from Jackson County in 1833, Clay County in 1836, and Carroll County just two weeks before. The governor merely made into state policy what had been county policy. He was a friend of faction leaders who, in practice, were an “expulsionist party.” This party gave Mormons an extermination order for Carroll County on 22 September, whereupon the Mormons petitioned the governor, reporting they were threatened with force and violence. They said their accusers had given them until 1 October to leave “and threatened, if not gone by that time, to exterminate them without regard to age or sex.” Governor Boggs’s order “only ratified the
program and slogans of the first-settlers’ party of upper Missouri.” The words “remove or be exterminated” were, Anderson observed, “expulsion party passwords.”7Anderson also affirmed that Governor Boggs’s order was a military order that was modified in the field but that technically lost its legal force when the military situation ended by 1 December. Since the Mormon exodus took place from December to April, “civilians without any authority enforced an expulsion policy that did not originate with the governor in the first place.”
http://mormonhistoricsitesfoundation.org/publications/studies_spring_01/MHS2.1Hartley.pdf
Perhaps some of the most impartial, if a bit sketchy, recordings of the anti-Mormon War of 1838 came from period journalists attempting to make sense of the events as they were happening:
The Mormon war has been terminated, by a surrender of the Mormon leaders to the troops under Gen. Atchinson. This happened on Sunday, Oct. 28th. On that day, about three thousand men, bein
g part of the army of 5000, ordered out under Gen. Clark, comprising Gen. Atchinson’s division made their appearance before the town of Far West, the county seat of Caldwell county, where the Mormons were entrenched. Upon their approach the Mormons had hoisted a white flag, which was shot down by Capt. Bogart, [Reverend Bogart] but was immediately replaced. Gen. Atchison then sent in a message, with a view to learn their wishes and intentions, when six of the leaders avowed their willingness to surrender, in the expectation that the Mormons should be unharmed. The surrender was accepted, and the individuals put under guard. Their names are Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, George Hinkle, Lyman Wight, Parley P. Pratt, and Mr. Knight. The Mormons assembled, at Far West, comprised 700 men under arms. Of this number, a small body of 150, retreated and pursued their way to the northern frontier.
The reports vary as to what happened after the surrender. In fact, our intelligence does not come down clearly to a period, later than the day of the capitulation.
[What happened after the surrender was rape, torture, murder and pillage—the details of which were not immediately forthcoming for obvious reasons. The details are however, now a part of the state records.]
On the day after, Gen. Atchison received the orders of the Governor, which has already been mentioned in this paper, as directing the expulsion or extermination of the Mormons. It is said that, shocked and disgusted with the severity of the command, he retired and went home. After that event, it is stated that several — some accounts say 40 of the Mormons — were put to death.
One version of the statement is, that the Mormons killed, at this time, were such as had not come into Far West. [To surrender.] We need, however, more certain and authentic information, than we now have, on this head.
Gen. Clark, with the remainder of the troops collected from the Counties below Caldwell, was, on the Friday after the surrender, encamped in Ray county, and had not then reached Far West.
It is stated that, about the time of the surrender, a Company of men — 200 in number — fell upon a body of the Mormons, in Splawn’s settlement, on Shoal Creek, about 20 miles from Far West. The Mormons, it is said, were 36 in number; and the story runs that all but four were put to death. Some of the names of the killed, as reported to us, are David Evans from Ohio, Jacob Fox, from Pennsylvania, Thomas M’Bride and his father, Mr. Daly, M. Merrill and his son-in-law, Mr. White, all from Ohio. [Haun’s Mill.]
The facts about Bogart’s fight are that two of his men were killed — one outright and one died of his wounds. At the same four Mormons fell — among them the captain of their band. [Battle of Crooked River.] Bogart’s company were stationed on the line of Ray Co., to intercept communication between Ray and Caldwell. They had captured 4 Mormons; and to rescue these the attack was made upon them by the Mormons. Bogart’s Company is said to have been 40 in number, and the Mormons 70.
As to the Mormon ravages in Daviess County — the plundering and burning of which so much has been said — we are informed that, before those hostile operations, the Mormons held a consultation, at which the propriety of the steps afterwards taken, was debated at large. Some of their number were averse to the plan, and nearly one third dissented from it. The reasons assigned for these measures, were alleged outrages by their enemies in Carroll and Daviess Counties.
According to the Mormon statement, their houses and buildings, near DeWitt, in Carroll County, had been destroyed by their enemies, and they themselves expelled from the County and afterwards pursued, on their retreat into Daviess. It was, therefore, as they allege, in retaliation for previous unprovoked outrages, that they executed their system of violence and terror in the County of Daviess. Evidently, they could not have adopted a more suicidal policy — allowing their own statements to be wholly true.
We have no time now — and it would take more space than we can spare for it — even with a knowledge of all the facts, to enter into a history of the origin and progress of this difficulty. But there is a statement in this connection, which we have heard but recently, and which we sincerely hope is not true. That statement is as follows:
About the 9th or 10th of last month, when about 80 Mormon families had been expelled from Carroll county, and driven into Daviess, a message was sent by them to the State executive, praying for his interposition in their behalf. The reply to that message was, that already the State had been put to a great deal of expense on account of these difficulties, and that he could see no cause to interpose, thus leaving the parties to fight it out!
[The governor’s latter response to the Mormon cry for help and justice is also now a part of the state record.]
–Daily Missouri Republican – November 9, 1838
[Not by the way, by any means a pro-Mormon newspaper.]
http://www.truthandgrace.com/1838warover.htm
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/findingaids/miscMormonRecords.asp?rec=eo
The above testimony of course, tends to negate the Christian apologist’s contention that the Missouri 
extermination order was justified because the Mormons attacked the state militia. OK, well, the Mormons did attack the militia. Anti-Mormons billed it as the “Battle of Crooked River,” and pretended the Mormons almost wiped out the entire militia contingent. As we see above however, only one of the state’s company was killed and another died of wounds later. And of course the “state militia” involved was a rogue body of Christian volunteers led by the infamous Captain Samuel Bogart, a Methodist minister and sworn enemy of Mormonism. And of course, Bogart and his men had been systematically raiding Mormon settlements, was the Vicar of Christ who slaughtered and hacked up old men and children at Haun’s Mill, killed perhaps a hundred or more Mormons there and elsewhere, and was at the time holding four Mormons hostage—the liberation of which was the sole intention of the so-called attack upon said “militia” at Crooked River.
Having been forcibly expelled from Jackson County in 1833, the Mormons had migrated north to a county specially created for them by the legislature, Caldwell. However, the influx of new Mormon converts into Missouri caused them to start settling in adjacent counties (including Daviess), which many older settlers felt they had no right to do.[4] Fears arose that the Mormons would take control of all political offices in nearby counties, and this combined with prejudice and fears about the Mormons’ economic practices, attitudes toward Native Americans and slaves, and other factors to create an explosive situation by the fall of 1838.[5]
Bogart first took an active role in anti-Mormon activities during a disturbance in Carroll County, where Mormons had established a settlement called De Witt, in violation of an alleged agreement with non-Mormons not to settle in that county. No written agreement to this effect was ever produced, but this did not stop renegade Missouri militiamen from laying siege to the Mormon settlement from October 1 to October 10, 1838. When General Hiram Parks arrived with militia troops—Bogart and his company among them—to restore order, Bogart and his unit immediately sided with the anti-Mormon mob, refusing to obey General Parks’ orders to such a point that Parks had to order them back to Ray County to prevent them from joining the vigilantes.[6] Parks unsuccessfully endeavored to have Bogart expelled from the State Guard for his insubordination.[7]
Following a fight between Mormons and non-Mormons during a county election in Gallatin, county seat of Daviess County, Bogart impetuously called out his militia unit, ostensibly to prevent an imminent invasion of Ray County by the Latter Day Saints. No such invasion was actually
contemplated, but Bogart decided to act aggressively against the Mormons, anyway.[8] He marched his company to the Caldwell County line, picking up volunteers along the way, then obtained permission from his new superior, General David Atchison, to “range the line” between the two counties to prevent any invasion of Ray County.[9] However, Bogart and his men decided that the defensive posture ordered by Atchison was not to their liking, and so they divided into smaller units and proceeded to disarm Mormons living first in northern Ray County, then in southern Caldwell, as well. Though clearly exceeding his original mandate, Bogart continued to harass and threaten local Mormon settlers and even threatened to give Far West—county seat of Caldwell County, and the main Mormon settlement in Missouri—”thunder and lightning” if the
Mormons did not leave the area forthwith.[1
…
Following the conclusion of the Mormon War, Bogart was involved in an altercation with fellow-citizen Alexander Beattie during a militia election, during which Bogart shot and killed Beattie, then fled to Texas with a thousand-dollar bounty on his head.[19] He settled in Washington County, where he joined the Texas Rangers and became a company commander in that organization.[20] While in the Rangers, Bogart participated in the abortive Mier Expedition in 1842–43 into Mexico, which resulted in the infamous “black bean” incident, where seventeen Texans were executed after drawing black beans in a random death lottery instituted by orders of Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Bogart survived his experiences in Mexico, and upon his return to Texas in 1844, settled down in Collin County. Here he would serve four two-year terms in the state legislature, including one as a senator.[21]
Bogart was never brought to justice for his murder of Beattie, nor for any of the depredations he had committed against the Mormons in Missouri.
Bogart resigned from the Texas legislature in 1861 on account of ill health, after signing the Texas ordinance of secession. He died on 11 March 1861, and is buried in Collin County in an unmarked grave.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bogart
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=59001968
The Most Reverend Major Bogart—a promotion given in Texas–is described by Christian apologists to this day as one of the “heroes” of the Missouri Mormon “rebellion.” And unless you want to count the Mountain Meadows Massacre, none of the “heroes” of any of the Mormon Wars were ever brought to justice.
Mormon Wars Part 1: The Fighting Parson
John Chivington was the swashbuckling Methodist minister who’s militant Christianizing and Abolitionist sermonizing got him driven out of the Kansas/Missouri conflicts of the mid 1800’s. “Bleeding Kansas,” it was called. His ecclesiastical overseers moved him to Nebraska territory for his own safety. When the Civil War broke out, in November of 1862 he turned down a US Army chaplain’s rank and took an officer’s commission. A “fighting” commission, rather than a “praying” commission, as he phrased it. He adopted the high, central Rockies and helped rush Colorado into statehood by first driving whole contingents of Rebel forces out of the region, and upon this epic foundation of fame and glory, Chivington next promoted himself into position as the primary agent of exterminating as much of the Cheyenne Nation as he could manage, men, women, and children. His crowning achievement was effected in November of 1864 and is today known shamefully as the “Massacre of Sand Creek.”
The Cheyenne, like many Native Americans, called themselves the “Human Beings.” Chivington didn’t think so.
Christian America is not short of God-blessed atrocities in the name of progress and Christian civilization. This is so obvious in retrospect, one would think the Christian apologist wouldn’t even bring up the Mormon question for fear of not only getting plastered with a deluge of historically undeniable persecutions they heaped upon the Mormons, but worse yet, of opening that black, fuming kettle of Born-Again butchery they inflicted upon the Native Americans in the same Christian, Holy Expansionist zeitgeist. Still, ever since the frontier heydays of Calvin’s little American holocaust, Christian historical revisionists have vainly sought to pull at least a single Mormon-on-Christian atrocity out of their magic, apologetic hats to “prove” the Mormons were up to something all along, and thus justify all their Christian paranoia and anti-Mormon violence.
The turd-polishing Christian-Nation shine-up specialists have always resorted to excusing their treatment of the Indians in America’s western expansion by countering with examples of Native American actions of equivalent revulsion. It’s the, they’re savages anyway–so tough-titty if they got treated like savages, defense. These Native incidents of course, were usually reciprocal, and very often in-kind responses to Christian initial aggression. But chronology is irrelevant when God is on your side and all the witnesses are either dead, can’t speak your language, can’t make their case in the public media, and have been banished to the an obscure wilderness where nobody will hear their complaints anyway.
And the truth is, particularly in the same Bible-Belt regions that still hate and abuse Mormons, the good Christians don’t treat Native Americans much better than they did when those territories and states were first opened. Tribes and reservations that ended up with casinos, fishing rights, oil, or otherwise fought themselves into industry that was self-sustaining or even massively profitable, are the objects of white Christian derision. America in large number, cries out in a country-wide chorus of pissing and moaning, as today’s good Christian citizens try to blow these tribes and their enterprises off at the knees, appropriate the client base of their gambling trade, pilfer their fish and game, steal their natural resources, cripple, and pick them to death until the good white Christians connive even that little bit of sovereignty away from them.
History is always written, and then revised, by the victors. In the case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the several Mormon Wars, the ultimate victors would be what even the devout Christian mainstream now calls the "Religious Right." These modern pretenders to Christian virtue use the aberrant and perplexing Mormon action at Mountain Meadows as undisputable proof of Mormonism’s “true” Satanic intent. This intent they claim, is simply to kill all the Christians and take all of their stuff.
The thing is, Christians believe everyone is trying to kill them off and take all their stuff. Christians believe all the stuff is theirs by Divine Right in the first place.
The 1857 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, as I will eventually elucidate in my own winding and convoluted fashion, is indeed the one act of uncalled-for and inexplicably motivated anti-Christian violence with which the Mormons have encumbered their otherwise admirable history of restraint. While it is undeniably a Mormon action against Christians, the exact reason or reasons for the Mormon-led eradication of some 120 Christian pioneers from Arkansas, and their rough, rednecked Missouri trail crew, as they passed through the remote, southern Utah Mormon settlements, it is far from clear. Was this action taken because they were Christians, or was it because they were a trainload of mouthy, pompous a-holes who had it coming? Did the Mormons simply side with their pissed-off friends, the local Native Americans, who had already taken the latter opinion? A harsh couple of questions those, and crudely put, yet, Christian America’s only widely embraced defense of generations of Mormon persecution honestly comes to the contention that Mormons are all mouthy, pompous a-holes and they had it coming. So in the case of Mountain Meadows, it is fair to ask, was this ultimately a case of “turn-about is fair play?”
What is clear however, is that neither Brigham Young as church president, nor any of the local Mormon authorities involved in the slaughter at Mountain Meadows, gleefully ran out and surrounded a Christian wagon train and shot them down as part of any program at any level in the LDS church to kill off all the Christians and take all their stuff. Mormons did not want their lives, their goods, their national sovereignty, they did not seek to destroy their Christian religion or any of the other related fables that anti-Mormonists have invented and fantasized into the narrative over the many generations that Christians have engaged in the anti-Mormonist hobby. The very clear and open position of Brigham Young and his followers was that they just wanted everyone else to piss off and leave them alone in their own state, to be loyal American citizens. That’s all. And still, for the anti-Mormonist’s paranoid abuse of Mormons through the years to be justifiable, Mormonism simply has to have a sinister underbelly. To this end, logic and facts aside, Mountain Meadows will forever be the only bit of unfabricated, empirical evidence “proving” the anti-Mormonist’s multi-generational claims of Mormon treachery, disloyalty, and lawlessness.
While the tragedy of Mountain Meadows cannot be denied, this complicated, bizarre, multi-party sequence of events, is proposed by the anti-Mormonists, to justify the entire 37 years of Christian oppression, rape, murder, torture and mayhem heaped upon the Mormons previous to this alleged strike back at their Christian tormentors. Mormons were indeed one of the several parties in conflict at Mountain Meadows. They clearly came out on top of the contest. Their tactics were underhanded and their motivation is suspect. But as in most issues that Christian antagonists raise against Mormonism, it’s not as clear as all that.
One of the most telling evidences of the less-than treasonous nature of the LDS church and its leadership in
the Mountain Meadows Massacre, is the fact that Brigham Young was investigated and pardoned of all involvement less than a year afterward, while a new Christian governor had just been installed and arrived with an army intent upon destroying Mormonism. The new governor failed to see the panic and called the extermination project off. Nobody in Utah on-site or in Washington ever took any great interest in making a church-breaking case out of Mountain Meadows. It was investigated twice, two trials were held because the first ended in a hung jury. Ultimately, one local Mormon leader was determined to be the ringleader, he faced a firing squad, and that was that
. Certainly, it remains a very personal tragedy for the descendants of the massacre. Advocates of the injured parties will perpetually claim that Brigham Young personally ordered the bushwhacking of an innocent wagon train of Christian pioneers. His motivation they ostensibly claim, is just that he’s an evil bastard. They will insist that John D Lee, the local Mormon bishop who was punished for the crime was a only a patsy and a scapegoat. But, with all due respect to those career anti-Mormonists who are still milking it today, the truly weird events at Mountain Meadows really did not, and does not say much about either the LDS church, its doctrines, or its patriotism.
Understanding the psychology of Mountain Meadows, attempting to analyze the motivations of Mormonism’s bad players in the debacle, will have to wait however. One has to fully grasp the early, frontier, American “Christian” phenomenon a little better first. To discover what motivated Mormonism’s counter-moves in the Christian war against them, you have to first peel back the well-crafted veneer overlaid upon the several histories anti-Mormonists have long promulgated, until you can first see how the Christian manufacturers of today’s American cultural identity have consistently varnished the facts to cover their own legacy of ugliness in any given event or conflict with them, be that with Mormonism, Native Americans, or any other party or sub-faction of their own body. You have to honestly, really get to know the allegedly peaceful, innocent, “God-fearing, patriotic Americans,” that period Mormons were dealing with in these highly sanitized Christian re-tellings of their dealings with “savages,” “traitors,” and “heretics” in the American West:
You need to think John Chivington, Butcher of Sand Creek, not Billy Graham or Mother Teresa.
Today we think of raving, fiery, fundamentalists as a crazy minority, but they were the mainstream Christians
of the early Mormon periods. They brought their fanaticism to Joseph Smith in Upstate New York as a child. He rejected and offended them there, and they have ever since followed his movement all the way across the country, out to Utah Territory and beyond, dogging and harassing his work and his people. When early Mormonism sent missionaries to the Pacific Islands, its Christian tormentors stalked them from Island to island in canoes, warning off the natives, putting them in fear of hell and damnation–never mind if as a result it put the lives of Mormon missionaries at risk.
The same pious, oppressively sour Christian fundamentalists who first made Holy War on Mormonism, crammed the Temperance Movement down America’s throat, shoved it all the way into Lady Liberty’s gullet, and for 13 hellish years America choked for a drink while cranky crones from the Anti-Saloon League and other Temperance NAZI’s and dry boosters, ran enough of America’s political structure to maintain a boot at the nation’s throat to spare it from the refreshment of fermented fruits and grains.
The difference between prohibition and Mormonism, is that nearly everybody in the country wanted a drink, even if their wives or ministers, political or social circles compelled them to support condemning alcohol. Yes, America admitted, liquor has its down side, but still, the nation wondered in the end, why penalize the 90% of the population who were perfectly respectable moderate 
drinkers because the other 10% had some, usually slight, level of difficulty dealing with alcohol?
Most of early Mormon-era America suspected Mormonism had a theoretical down-side even if it didn’t personally affect them. But they had no motivation to do anything about it. Unlike alcohol however, Americans in general had no inherent, burning desire to be a Mormon. Mormonism had few bold advocates outside of its own. And when outside advocates became Mormons, they were then just numbered as Mormons and their broader social and political influence usually vanished in a puff of bigotry. The average American had no dog in the fight and was thus oblivious to the issue or went along to get along with prevailing anti-Mormon activists.
In the fight for alcohol, eventually the wet voters threw off their Temperance persecutors and the dry political factions came to be seen as a load of bitter, dower old bats who primarily resented their husbands having a local tavern in which to escape from them. The scales lifted from America’s eyes and the Temperance Movement was clearly seen to be nothing more than the overly-pious, Church-Police—State fantasy of a load of withered-up sourpuss preachers and unhappy, frumpy, bitter old crones who just had a problem with people enjoying life in general.
Temperance efforts existed in antiquity, but the movement really came into its own as a reaction to
the pervasive use of distilled beverages in modern times. The earliest organizations in Europe came into being in Ireland in the 1820s, then swept to Scotland and Britain. Norway and Sweden saw movements rise in the 1830s. In the United States, a pledge of abstinence had been promulgated by various preachers, notably John Bartholomew Gough, at the beginning of the 1800s. Temperance associations were established in New York (1808) and Massachusetts (1813). The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (1826) was interdenominational. Thanks largely to the lead from the pulpit, some 6,000 local temperance groups in many states were up and running by the 1830s.
The movement existed in a matrix of unrest and intellectual ferment in which such other social ills as slavery, neglect and ill-treatment of marginalized people, [Ed.note: Like Jews, Catholics, Indians and Mormons] were addressed by liberals and conservatives alike. Sometimes called the First Reform Era, running through the 1830s and ’40s, it was a period of inclusive humanitarian reform.
The first statewide success for the temperance movement was in Maine, which passed a law on June 2, 1851, which served as model for other states. Proponents suggested that it was motivated by a justified concern for the public welfare, but not all agreed. An anonymous letter which appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (May 1852) suggested that:
http://www.wpl.lib.oh.us/AntiSaloon/
http://prohibition.osu.edu/asl/
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1054.html
The American Christians who gave us the Temperance Movement and Prohibition, were the same American
Christians who also drove the anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic, anti-Indian, and every other anti-Movement. Mormonism arose in the same regions, religions, nations, sects and cultures as the Temperance Movement, and blossomed in the center of all these revivalists exercises. As Mormonism fled west, the revivalist fanatics expanded west to meet them again and again. They followed Mormonism like a pack of bickering dogs, snapping for scraps of Mormon prosperity, jealous of the Mormon progress in lands, congregations, and societies, from the Northeast to the Intermountain West.
To their delight, in the vast isolation of the American West, Mormonism finally exposed a few doctrinal ticks that its Christian detractors began to find America had a genuine, universal cultural disagreement with. If America’s forces of matronly prudishness and their exclusive ministers of piety and patriotism believed they could send you to prison for drinking a beer, these self-righteous Christian crusaders surely believed they could send you to prison for taking another wife or two. This is particularly true as I say, since the revivalist movement was driven in good measure by embittered old wives who’s husbands habitually found refuge from their dour personas in the nearest tavern.
The old Christian battle axes didn’t want hubby getting ideas—or exploring alternatives. They were on a unilateral mission to cleanse, purify, and reform American society. Then, they thought, the old man would find no quarter. Left with no place to hide, he would penitently return home to the domestic domination of his wife, and spend all his time helping around the house, and teaching his children to be good Christians.
In the case of Prohibition of course, "Church Lady," instead of stifling the carnal nature of America’s Christian manhood, gave America organized crime and the bootlegging, moonshining, and smuggling industries that went on to provide the blueprint for today’s illicit drug industry and international drug cartels. Church Lady inadvertently gave her old man the speak-easy, where he could not only have a drink with the lads, but frolic with a rising generation of hot, sexy young “flappers” and listen to “jungle music” from the latest bunch of negroes to make it big on the jazz circuit that these dens of alcohol and sex first gave a national stage to. Where the old hu
bby once relished only a quiet beer after work with his pals for a few hours before going home to face the wife, now he caroused all night with a packed house of drunken young men and women who had discovered sex, booze, reefer, morphine, ether, 
cocaine and jazz. Mr. Church Lady reveled with sinners and became addicted to an exhilarating sense of illegality. And if the old guy couldn’t get the flappers drunk enough to bed them, all he had to do is nod to the barkeep and an obliging escort would appear in moments for a small fee.
That made America a better place alright. Thanks Church Lady.
The general American male population may have resented the Puritanical anti-Mormon forces even more than the Mormons themselves, but figured that as long as the fun-killing Calvinists, the prudish Presbyterians, the wailing Wesleyans, and the battling Baptists with their ever-beckoning Arminian dunk tanks were harassing Mormons, they were leaving the good Christian menfolk alone to find safe haven in a backsliding man-cave in the urban wild wild west, with a good stiff drink, a fat cigar, and a hooker or mistress on each arm.
Even today, you’ll find the same spirit of obnoxious Christian “Temperance League” style aggression alive in the infamous Westboro Baptist congregation, who’ve made it their mission to go about the country spitting on the graves of war heroes, crashing funerals, screaming at their mothers, wives, fathers, brothers, families and survivors, telling 
them that God hates their dead loved one because military policy allows homosexuals to serve in the armed forces. It defies any logic to connect the Westboro bigots’ damnation of fallen war heroes–who may well be straight and Christian–to their theoretical proximity to some person in their ranks that might have been homosexual, even if you hate homosexuals. Protesting homosexuals, at their funerals in general, or picketing funerals of openly homosexual military heroes would make some sense along those lines. But that’s the way the Christian fanatical mind works.
It doesn’t.
Back at the height of anti-Mormonism of course, the Westboro Baptists would have been well armed, would have had all the local politicians and civil authorities in their camp, and come at their foes in the middle of the night with shotguns, pistols, rifles, kerosene and torches.
Alarmingly, the “Progressive,” the “Gay” or “Liberal,” allegedly educated and civilized public, ranks these Satanically inspired Westboro Baptists right alongside Mormons—the same Mormons the forefathers of the Westboro Baptists were raping and hacking up and burning and shooting into attempted extinction. Why? B
ecause apparently elements of the LDS church in California recently rallied a political movement to put down a proposition that would re-define the term “Marriage,” to mean the social, domestic, and sexual union of essentially any two adults of either gender or any combination or permutation thereof. The irony of it all, is that up until fifty or so years ago, the religious comrades of the Westboro Baptist church were hanging “niggers and queers and Mormons” as they would term them, openly, in white sheets and pointy hats–while proudly voting Democrat.
Back in the day, it was the Mormons pleading the case against the KKK. The KKK was the enforcement arm of the Christian Democrat. It was the Mormons telling the government to get its nose out of their bedrooms. It was the Mormons who first took to the Supreme Court the proposition that civil government had no right to regulate and limit the institution of Holy Matrimony strictly along orthodox, western Christian social convention. And it was the Christian Democrats and their KKK-filled congregations and voter constituencies that packed the Supreme Court with judges who decreed that marriage is an entirely civil institution and can therefore be defined any way the civil authorities care to define it.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-jacobs/mormon-church-on-prop-8-w_b_140804.html
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/reynoldsvus.html
http://www.enotes.com/supreme-court-drama/reynolds-v-united-states
Little has changed with the historically Christian enemies of Mormonism since the KKK days. There’s still a KKK for one thing. They’re still down south in fair numbers and occasionally they still try to shoot, burn or beat Mormons out of the Bible Belt. When you have an entire religion, a comprehensive culture, like orthodox Christianity, that keeps telling its population from infancy that this or that identifiable minority is directly serving Satan, when you tell your children that some easily marked boogieman is trying to rob them of their rightful inheritance of land and power in America, eventually somebody is going to take a pop at the nearest servant of Satan or try to kill the boogieman.
You can’t blame the generations of America’s Bible-thumping offspring raised to hate non-Christians, or gays
or blacks or foreigners, or in this case, Mormons, because it makes perfect sense to them to stick it to the Mormons or their other cultural demons, before, as they imagine, the Mormons or any other of their feared hellish hordes, stick it to them. They spend their entire lives in a self-inflated bubble of paranoia, waiting, waiting, and still waiting for this or that conniving foe to suddenly rear its seemingly docile head and strike.
For some reason however, even those who have received a higher education, those with elevated degrees in “thinkology,” are unable to make any distinction between Mormonism, the KKK, and fundamentalist wackos like the Westboro Baptists. And so, even those who pretend to be classical Liberals, dedicated to honest journalism, to accurate, as opposed to reconstructed history, usually go into Mormon news, Mormon history, or Mormon theology, determined to make the facts conform to their pre-determined image of Mormonism as a generic, book-burning, small-minded, delusional cult of Christian Fundamentalist zealots. The fundamentals of Mormonism however, come down to accountability to man, civil law, and God. Mormonism is all about the Constitution being a Divine document, and America being ordained by God as a place of free worship and civil liberty.
The fundamentals of historic Christianity are: I’m saved no matter what I do. Everyone else is a child of Satan. I am the mortal arm of God’s will. I am his protector and avenger.
Liberals have their suspicion of danger exactly backward, and we see this also in their failure to recognize the
danger of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. In fact, the Left seems quite eager to embrace the Palestinian, the Arab, the Muslim guerrilla causes. The US for example, backed the Afghan “Freedom Fighters” in their struggle to throw off Soviet Oppression of their religion, but then the Mujahedeen won their freedom and morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Right realizes, too late, that they got fooled. Liberals must know that if given the chance, most of their pet Islamic poster-children at the drop of a hat would love to impose Sharia Law and start beheading Liberals–starting with the most vocal opponents to the allegedly repressive LDS church, the
Gay Rights crowd. Godless Liberals, Gay Liberals, Christian Liberals, it wouldn’t matter: they’re all going to be dead under Sharia law. Then the Muslim fanatics would move on to the Conservative Christians as well. We’re all infidels to the Islamic Jihadists and subject to systematic persecution, prosecution, and imposed conversion or extinction.
The Left excuses the inherent civil rights and misogynist values of historic Arab and other Islamic cultures, it even encourages and finances rebellion across the continents to replace pluralistic secular governments in the middle east with Islamic theocracies. I can’t explain how they think this works to their benefit, but Liberals then accuse Mormonism of embracing a similar culture as if it’s a very bad thing
The “enlightened” Left is far more inclined to just leave Muslim society to treat its people according to barbaric local custom, than tolerate Mormonism, because in Mormonism’s case, espousing traditional family values and conventional sexual morality, is billed as the most wicked form of oppression and bigotry. Mormons not wanting to re-define the English word “Marriage” and instead use some other label like “Domestic Union” or “Domestic Partnership,” for instance, in the mind of the lunatic Left, is the moral equivalent of dragging “fags” through the public square, chained behind a well-armed and ruggedly manned Toyota pickup to make an example of them for the rest of the village.
See, it’s not Mormonism that kills homosexuals. Sharia Law does that. The Left’s favorite Egyptian and Palestinian heroes do that. And, who else does that? Rednecks. Christian rednecks, the traditional enemies of Mormonism. How many gay victims have Mormon missionaries dragged through the streets to their deaths so far?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/hatecrimes/stories/brothers072199.htm
None. Zero.
Christian rednecks however, have done that and worse to Mormon missionaries. Rednecks hate Mormons because their minister says they’re devilish heretics. They worship a phony Jesus, not the real Jesus. Leftists and neo-Liberals hate Mormons because they don’t embrace the gay lifestyle and at one time banned negroes from holding priesthood office, or at one time "enslaved" multiple wives and currently still "enslave" women in underling roles. Mormons are neither fish nor fowl in this contemporary American Left-Right scenario. They are neither like their Islamic, Jewish, or Christian religious fellows, all of whom justify themselves via the same sort of “join or die, and you’re all going to hell,” Biblical theology. You cannot second-guess Mormonism from a Liberal/Conservative, Christian, or even Jewish or Islamic mindset. It’s a whole other thing. It’s a Joseph Smith thing. It is a religion and culture frozen in the enlightened, Jeffersonian, “Great Architect of the Universe” era. And even in the context of their original social, religious, and political environment, as enlightened, classical Liberals, there too they were the odd-man-out of nearly every national issue. They have been, still are, and probably always will be, the common enemy of all.
http://publicpolicyalliance.org/?p=288
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran
http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/06/dragging.death.02/index.htmlhttp://www.cnn.com/US/9807/06/dragging.death.02/index.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=683834n
http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/42/42sciabarra.php
http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/09/gay_bashing_on_broadway_young_man_attack
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story
But it’s Mormons the American Left now singles out for persecution. Not Islamo-fascists. Not fag-baiting Baptists
who disrupt military funerals for no logical reason. No, oddly enough, it’s redneck bikers mostly without a gay-activist bone in their bodies coming out to those disruptions to put themselves between the foaming Baptists and the fallen heroes—not the Gay Pride crowd or the Leftist Sons of Berkeley. No, all the gay-loving, hippy-wannabees are out picketing Mormon temples instead. They seem little interested in putting down openly antagonistic mobs of actual homophobes carrying “God hates Gays” banners. Maybe this is because the Lefties all know the Mormons won’t drag them out of bed, tie them to a fence, light their genitals on fire, and beat them to death. Maybe it’s because they suspect there’s a good chance that rednecks of the Westboro Baptist church and its friends will.
The danger America faces is not in having a so-professed Mormon prophet because he might go loony and make Mormons do weird things. Anyone who’s seriously studied the actual content of Mormon canon and doctrinal literature would laugh at this notion. Mormonism has a nearly two-hundred year long history of growing more and more placid, innocuous and uneventful. The real danger to American society is having a 
ruling population of Christians who believe everyone else is going to hell and non-Christians have no right to any place in a Christian America. They don’t need a prophet. They don’t need governing councils or quorums or a consensus vote on anything. Any crazy Christian bumpkin can grab a Bible, call himself “saved” and “called” to the ministry, make up his own rules, gather a sympathetically warped congregation, and he’s instantly in the business of dominating American life and culture according to whatever demented world view comes into his head. All he has to do is claim it stems from some delusional read of the Bible. That’s Al Qaeda. It’s a snake with thousands of heads that just keep growing back no matter how many you lop off trying to defend yourself from it.
You fire up a movement. You get everyone jazzed. Then you point the mob at a target and let them figure out how to accomplish the goal of dominating competitors. You can call it the Tea Party, or Occupy Wall Street, or anything you want. But once set in motion, a very few key, usually unseen players can manipulate the monster to attack their chosen targets and direct it anywhere they want. Your local minister gives a fiery sermon against homosexuals, and a few weeks later some punks tie a gay guy to a fence and light him on fire. It’s connected, but then it’s not connected, and you can’t really stop it once it starts. There is nobody in charge, or at least, no single person or organization in charge of all of it all at once.
Joseph Smith called that a “Mobocracy.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Identity
The hereditary enemies of Mormonism are the self-proclaimed, good Christian forces of Biblical American purity that gave us the Civil War, and before that, the Missouri Bushwhackers and the Kansas Jayhawks who murdered and raided, burned and pillaged each other like rabid animals, after they’d “purified” themselves of the Mormon “threat.” The good, solid Christian Americans who posed Mormonism as a danger to Missouri and Illinois, and indeed the sovereignty of the United States of America, were almost to the man, a few years later seceding from the Union and leading the Christian South in outright rebellion and wholesale war against the Constitution. These are the "Christians" Mormons turned against at Mountain Meadows.
Early anti-Mormonism, like Prohibition, was a fanatical, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant phenomenon. Like the Temperance Movement, anti-Mormonism started in the furious religious revivalism of the early 19th century, and took nearly a hundred years to achieve it’s ultimate goal, in the one case, the outlawing of alcohol, in the other case, the extermination, or at least political and social castration of Mormonism.
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
One would think that at least the political Left and the legitimately “enlightened” would immediately recognize a common enemy in those who claim the Constitution was intended to found and enforce a national, neo-Calvinist, militant, Christian fundamentalist theocracy. But the historical tar brush has been laid on so black and so sticky, and the coating of dark goo has been so long painted upon Mormonism, that even the most intellectually and spiritually astute today actually see some sort of moral equivalency in the anti-Mormon claim that Mormonism might be up to something underhanded, that Mormonism is perverted Christianity, Satan’s fake church, and therefore whatever America’s Christian Patriots have inflicted upon the LDS church and its people over the years, is only due to Mormon provocation.
Mormonism existing is a provocation.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/individuals/john-eidsmoe
http://www.allaboutmormons.com/brief_critique_anti-mormon_propaganda.php
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/why-anti-mormon-rhetoric-acceptable-us
Then too, I suppose it is easy to believe that early anti-Mormon persecution was over-rated if you’re also a Holocaust denier. If you believe Hitler only killed a few hundred-thousand Jews and not 7 million, so that’s no big deal. Or if you believe Israel blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11 with remote-controlled aircraft and there never were any real hijackers or passengers aboard. People believe that stuff. A lot of them. However, a more 
likely truth, one supported by voluminous, well-documented confession, admission, and boasting of the anti-Mormon forces themselves, is that Mormonism’s Christian neighbors wanted to enslave black people, administer the law, courts, and all civil government directly from their interpretation of the Bible, effectively give their chosen preachers and ministers of God a civil theocracy, and repress anyone who didn’t support them. Fair is fair. Critics of Mormonism are correct. Mormons could not get along with those sorts of neighbors. Neither could you. Neither could the vast majority of Americans today.
Ask the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and the other “civilized,” or rather, “Christianized” eastern Native American tribes about not being able to get along with their neighbors. They were the first to get to know the same “God-fearing” Christian hillbillies and good American patriots the Mormons seemed to have trouble getting along with a generation later. Even after converting to Christ, attending worship regularly, building houses, running farms, wearing “civilized” clothes their white Christian conquerors insisted they
wear, after surrendering their children to white schools, after learning the white man’s language and customs and manners, the good white Christian folk of Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, the entire eastern seaboard, one day just decided they didn’t like “Injins” living amongst them and drove these Born-Again Native Christians, their brothers in Christ, out of their ancestral homelands at gunpoint, into the dead of winter with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to die in the unopened western wilderness.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
http://www.studyworld.com/indian_removal_act_of_1830.htm
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/7402
http://www.coppercountry.com/article_97.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_termination_policy
The “Indian Removal Act of 1830” was the brainchild of “Hickory” Andrew Jackson, an Irish-American Presbyterian and patron saint of the Tennessee hillbillies for whom he’d specifically cleared out the eastern Indian tribes. Presbyterians were hard-core Calvinists, theological arch-enemies of Mormonism, 
and Jackson’s “Scots-Irish” stock became the ethnic root of the term “redneck.” Jackson was the instigator of a near-genocidal American national policy of exterminating or otherwise neutralizing the heathen savages of any non-white, non-Christian race, creed or color. President Andrew Jackson and Congressional fellows, wanted to progressively secure their new land from coast-to-coast for the Manifest Destiny of good, white, Christian patriots.
The westward-moving white Christian settlers often shot Indians on sight, friend or foe. They didn’t stop to ask, as it wasn’t considered relevant. Christian “civilization” continually headed farther west to claim new Indian land, and if the Indians retaliated, the settlers cried to the army, and the US army, led by Christian patriots like John Chivington, rode into Native American villages in places like Sand Creek Colorado, and slaughtered men, women and children indiscriminately to teach Native America the New Christian Order of things.
John Chivington was the American Christian renaissance man of his day. He became a serious influence on regional Illinois religion and politics almost immediately after his 1844 ordination. He started his adventures in religion and war just as his fellow Illinois Christians, with some help from like-minded Missouri crusaders, were murdering Joseph Smith. Chivington served his first clerical duties in post-Joseph Smith era Illinois as the last of the Mormons were being beaten down, scraped up, and mopped out of the state. Caught up in the excitement of westward Christian expansion, Chivington ended up in a very volatile Kansas Territory. An avid Abolitionist, he soon found himself on the losing side of the question and he got driven out into Nebraska Territory by Missouri bushwhackers and pro-slavery Kansas thugs much the same way Joseph Smith had been run out of the same area by the same people for the same reason–once again, Andy Jackson’s sainted Tennessee hillbillies and their visions of slaves, plantations, wealth, and power.
When the Civil War broke out, Colorado’s territorial governor, William Gilpin, offered Chivington a commission as a chaplain, but he declined the "praying" commission and asked for a "fighting" position instead. In 1862, Chivington, by that point a Major in the first Colorado Volunteer Regiment, played a critical role in defeating confederate forces at Glorietta Passin eastern New Mexico, where his troops rapelled down the canyon walls in a surprise attack on the enemy’s supply train. He was widely hailed as a military hero.
Back in Denver after the defeat of the Confederacy’s Western forces, Chivington seemed destined for even greater prominence. He was a leading advocate of quick statehood for Colorado, and the likely Republican candidate for the state’s first Congressional seat. In the midst of his blossoming political prospects, tensions between Colorado’s burgeoning white population and the Cheyenne Indians
reached a feverish pitch. The Denver newspaper printed a front-page editorial advocating the "extermination of the red devils" and urging its readers to "take a few months off and dedicate that time to wiping out the Indians."
Chivington took advantage of this dangerous public mood by blasting the territorial governor and others who counseled peace and treaty-making with the Cheyenne. In August of 1864, he declared that "the Cheyennes will have to be roundly whipped — or completely wiped out — before they will be quiet. I say that if any of them are caught in your vicinity, the only thing to do is kill them." A month later, while addressing a gathering of church deacons, he dismissed the possibility of making a treaty with the
Cheyenne: "It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty. I am fully satisfied, gentlemen, that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado."
Several months later, Chivington made good on his genocidal promise. During the early morning hours of November 29, 1864, he led a regiment of Colorado Volunteers to the Cheyenne’s Sand Creek reservation, where a band led by Black Kettle, a well-known "peace" chief, was encamped. Federal army officers had promised Black Kettle safety if he would return to the reservation, and he was in fact flying the American flag and a white flag of truce over his lodge, but Chivington ordered an attack on the unsuspecting village nonetheless. After hours of fighting, the Colorado volunteers had lost only 9 men in the process of murdering between 200 and 400 Cheyenne, most of them women and children. After the slaughter, they scalped and sexually mutilated many of the bodies, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.
Like the anti-Mormon engagements in Missouri and Illinois, in which ordained mi
nisters openly led militia charges intent upon extermination, the Sand Creek Massacre was proudly rallied together by a well-known Christian a-hole sporting an ordination to the ministry. Chivington was nick-named the “Fighting Parson,” originally for shooting it out with his pro-slavery critics in Kansas. But his exploits with his volunteer, mob-militia in Colorado, were clearly a strategy he learned in the Missouri and Illinois anti-Mormon extermination attempts. At Sand Creek he rode ahead of his troops, gloriously blessing their atrocities as they cleansed the land of heathen filth:
I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces … With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors … By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops …
—- John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865[18]
Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch …
—- Stan Hoig[19]
Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek. His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer ‘spose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things? I tell you what, I don’t like a hostile red skin any more than you do. And when they are hostile, I’ve fought ‘em, hard as any man. But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would.
—- Kit Carson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
Today, there are few Americans of any serious religious or political stripe who would ever excuse, much less praise, the dark and evil deeds of so-called “Christian Soldiers” like John Chivington. And nobody pretends that they didn’t work this savagery openly in their day, and with the blessing of Christian America and its most prominent and respected Christian clergy. Today, most Christians even shy away from their historically boasted claims to a complete and exclusive Christian license to do with America as they please in the name of God by force of arms. Or as Chivinton once said:
By the grace of God and these two revolvers, I am going to preach here today.
Bu
t then, Chivington made this boast in conjunction with preaching Abolitionism to southern hillbilly rednecks, and his Northern Abolitionist fans, the victors who wrote the now canonized media accounts and attendant histories, made him into a hero for it. Joe Smith made the same arguments without guns and Missouri put him in jail for it. Missouri burned and bloodied his people for it. In Illinois he ran for president on an abolitionist ticket and a mob of proto-KKK hooligans killed him for it. And when Joe Smith pulled a couple of pistols and tried to defend himself in that action, today’s Mormon Holocaust deniers actually try to say that Smith’s manly response proves he’s not a martyr. Joe Smith went out fighting for his life they claim, so that essentially makes him just as guilty as the mob of Christians who killed him, and no real hero at all.
http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/nauvoo-and-the-myth-of-mormonisms-persecuted-innocence/
http://www.equip.org/articles/the-martyrdom-of-joseph-smith
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/martyr_joseph.htm
http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith/Martyrdom/Qualification_as_martyr
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2572018/posts
The point isn’t whether or not Joe Smith surrendering to an obviously hostile conspiracy against him, even though he was quite at liberty to flee their wrath, is really “going like a lamb to the slaughter,” as he put it. The point is, the ancestors of the Christians playing these semantic games today, are the ones who killed Joseph Smith even though he had submitted to their promises of protection, justice, and a fair trial. He was trapped, helpless, and undefended, (as they presumed) and was innocent in the eyes of the law.
So whatever poor Joe Smith was, the real question is, what does that make the Christians who promised him justice and a fair hearing, and instead, promoted, authorized, and gleefully celebrated his death by such treachery? What does that make of the modern Christian anti-Mormonist who would seriously even descend to this desperately low-level of quibbling? It makes their forefathers murderers, and them, apologists for murderers.
Most Christians now confess the sinful nature of their treatment of Native Americans in the founding of the United States. Most modern Christians repent of their disgraceful treatment of African slaves in the New World. And some of them even realize they compounded the simple evil of killing off Indians to take their lands, by then building slave-driven cotton plantations powered by tortured Africans, and justifying it by way of a well-considered Biblical argument executed in the name of Jesus Christ. I’d even wager that most Christians today willingly concede that the white, Anglo-European, Christian colonization of most of the undeveloped world was carried out in an oppressive, cruel, and shameful fashion. How odd it is then, that so damned few of these same modern, allegedly enlightened Christians, even the most liberal of them, will admit that those same 19th and 20th century Christian forces of world colonization, their ancestral heroes of Christian domination and subjection, treated Mormons in exactly the same belligerent, aggressively oppressive, cruel, and shameful fashion in which they treated any other “heathens” around the globe as they expanded their religious, political and social empires.
…Silas Soule, a commander of a cavalry company who refused to attack the Cheyenne at Sand Creek
, testified against Colonel Chivington. His testimony was key in the committees findings that the attack on Sand Creek was "a cowardly and coldblooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy, and the face of every American with shame and indignation." Silos Soule never had the opportunity to hear the committees findings because he was shot near his home in Denver by Charles W. Squiers of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry. Sadly, the Indian Peace Commission led to the forced relocation of native peoples to Indian reservations and did not result in the criminal prosecution of Colonel Chivington. Instead, the state of Colorado named a city after Chivington to honor his "heroic" military campaigns during the civil war.
http://www.judybaca.com/now/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=65&limitstart=1
While Christian America was gleefully celebrating the butchery of Chivington’s glorious “victory” against unarmed Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek, the Mormons were hiding out in the mountains next-door, attempting to shelter themselves from the same Christian bastards who had repeatedly threatened them with the same Holy Christian slaughter and extermination from region to region in the New World, as they fled their pious Christian persecutors. Mormonism had already suffered the same sort of grisly Christian gore-fest that Chivington later imported to the Rocky Mountains. The clergy-led cruelty and mutilation at Haun’s Mill and the Siege, rape, plunder and pillage of Far West were probably the very models for Chivington’s tactics against Native American Populations in Colorado. Christian America had sworn that all impediments would fall before the comprehensively expanding Christian franchise on the North American Continent, and by God, Christian warriors like Chivington were eager to join the fight.
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/danites_p8.htm
http://www.quaqua.org/extermination.htm
Surely, Christianity disagreed violently with itself upon the issue of slavery. Christianity was however, fairly united in its views upon the continued threat of both the Mormon and Indian presence in its empire. In my reading at least, nobody else has historically been discerning enough to see the overt connection between the times and fates of these two American cultural deviants. But these two peoples were historically joined at the hip:
In the beginning, Appalachian Bible-thumping rednecked hicks chased out the local Indians with fire and sword, leaving them to struggle and die in the unsettled wilderness to their west, simply so they could take Native American lands and resources, and be free of their heathen presence. Then the hillbillies imported and birthed and filled up Appalachia with so many new rednecked hicks that they could no longer find land and fortunes in the piney woods of Georgia, or the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, the Carolinas and eastern environs. A new generation of hicks became even more determined to make good on the God-promised American dream. They moved west to buy cheap land and construct their fantasized cotton plantations full of slaves and outbuildings. In Missouri, then the far west, they found Yankee and foreign Mormons moving in, buying up their land, outbidding them, driving up the prices, and 
out-competing them in agriculture and industry. They had a great friend in their patron saint Andrew Jackson, who was now president of the United States. They had a governor who depended upon their raggedy-arsed hillbilly votes. So once again, they simply drove the Mormon heretics out of their state by fire and sword, canon and ball, like their parents had done to the Indian heathens.
Now, don’t take just my word on it when I call the anti-Mormonists of the Missouri, Nauvoo, and Utah Mormon war or Mountain Meadows eras hicks and hillbillies. Even pro-hillbilly Christian historians and Journalists openly acknowledge the huge rift between the educated, industrialized, Northeastern American, and Northern European Mormons who actually wore shoes and shirts even on hot days, and the anti-Mormon country rubes they politely called “Old Settlers” from over in Tennessee and other regions of the eastern American woods and weeds, in their rope-tied, gunny-sack trousers and flour-sack shirts, desperate to escape their low social status and poverty in the settled United States.
(But you can’t escape stupid. It followed them everywhere they went.)
Inauguration
Main article: Andrew Jackson 1829 presidential inauguration
Jackson was the first President to invite the public to attend the White House ball honoring his first inauguration. Many poor people came to the inaugural ball in their homemade clothes. The crowd became so large that Jackson’s guards could not keep them out of the White House, which became so crowded with people that dishes and decorative pieces inside were eventually broken. Some people stood on good chairs in muddied boots just to get a look at the President. The crowd had become so wild that the attendants poured punch in tubs and put it on the White House lawn to lure people outside. Jackson’s raucous populism earned him the nickname "King Mob".
Driven even farther west by these Born-Again cretins, the Mormons and Indians ended up in the Intermountain West, living mostly happily amongst themselves for a while. But then, the California and Oregon Territories became the new west. America’s Christian revolutionary forces had expanded their WASP-only program across the whole continent. That put the Mormons and the Indians once again smack in the middle of Christian America’s road to California gold and intercontinental mastery.
To Christian America’s leadership, both the native “savages” and the heretical Mormons were not human beings with God-given rights, to bargain or reason with. These ungodly creatures were merely seen as impediments to Christian rule. They were Satanically-inspired, soulless animals that could only be controlled by killing them all off. Again, the mobs that killed Mormons were not random street gatherings, they were directed, orchestrated, and very often led by Christian clergy, and this quite openly. The rape, torture and slaughter didn’t happen incidentally, it was the whole point. It was Christian terrorism.
For all its particular horror, Sand Creek was not unique in the long history of Christian conquests. In John Chivington, we do not have an aberration. John Chivington was an 
immensely popular, mainstream, period, frontier-Christian minister who was given unanimous civil and military authority to execute Christian America’s mandate upon the non-Christian. He did what Christianity has always done when given civil and military authority to enforce its demands upon others.
The Sand Creek massacre is a pattern of Christian behavior that arises inevitably out of the fundamental Christian belief that Christians are superior to and have dominion over all other life forms, human or otherwise. It is a pattern of behavior openly and proudly repeated from Constantine to the Inquisition, to Calvin’s Geneva, to the Salem Witch Trials, to open warfare against Mormons and Indians in Christianity’s “final solution” to both problems in the American west.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_West,_Missouri
http://www.farwesthistory.com/haunbro.asp
While Indians were hated, feared, dehumanized, and despised by white Christian settlers and their clerical puppet masters, to period Christianity, even worse than that, Mormons were race traitors and heretics.
But then again, in a pragmatic sense, what really inflamed the anti-Mormon violence, the true source of the political and legal desperation to be rid of them, what ultimately got them driven into the wilderness of Utah, is simply that Mormons were in the road. Mormons and Indians were impeding progress. Most of America agreed upon that much. And that’s what enabled the violent fanatics to have their way with them both. Cleaning up the west was deemed a necessary outgrowth of America’s Manifest Destiny. You couldn’t stop that. God was behind that. Much of America felt sorry about it all, but resigned: Let the Mormons fight it out for themselves. Let the Indians adjust or die off.
Unfortunately, Mormons were not just pesky outsiders who kept occupying land that the good Christian
common folk wanted. Mormons took even crap land and built small empires in the wilderness at an alarming pace. The Native American populations were no such threat to the “natural order” of the new nation. They were rapidly being culturally nullified and whittled into isolated, politically and militarily powerless reservations where they were supposed to wither away into an ignominious extinction. The Mormons on the other hand, were flourishing no matter how brutally they were oppressed, and no matter where they were driven. They were smart. They knew the law, the Constitution. They were free and white. They had lawyers. They had rights and they knew it.
(Mormons also riled up the negroes and the Indians, and put all sorts of ideas about rights in their heads too.)
Mormonism’s Christian foes knew that Mormons were perfectly entitled under the Constitution to buy as much land as they wanted, and then build and grow their own booming religious community along the lines of their own faith and customs. That was the promise of the United States of America. That’s exactly what the Christians were trying to do. Indians, they had no rights, just out of a national sense of conquering white bigotry. White, Christian America didn’t have to negotiate with them about anything if it wasn’t in a charitable mood at the given moment. But the only way to rid a Christian America of the Mormon pests was to prove somehow that Mormonism was a demonstrable threat to Christian liberty, and an enemy of Constitutional rule. White-on-white persecution was far more difficult to rationalize.
For generations, America’s Calvinist legal approach against Mormonism amounted merely to repeating attempts in various legal venues to prove that anyone claiming to talk to God was inherently dangerous, and should be
wiped from the face of the map therefore by force of arms. The operative claim was simply that Mormons were loyal to their prophet, not the United States of America, and therefore could not be trusted. It was the same reasoning used in America’s white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant anti-Roman Catholic gambit. Whether or not they were doing anything imminently threatening, illegal, or un-Constitutional was irrelevant. It was just a matter of time it was claimed, before Christian America woke up to find itself the prisoner of Mormonism. (Or in the latter case, a slave of the Pope.) Once that paranoid fear had been sold to the general public, the anti-Mormonists assumed, any excuse or pretext for immediate, terminal action against the Latter-day Saints would suffice. It turned out in the end however, that the American public wasn’t buying that proposition very much outside the inbred southern, fundamentalist hillbilly factions who kepts habitually making their homes around the various Mormon settlement. To most of America, Mormons just didn’t seem all that dangerous and disloyal. In fact, to some, Mormons seemed quite productive, peaceful, and reasonable.
In the words of Brigham Young:
"I love the government and the Constitution of the United States, but I do not love the damned rascals that administer the government."
It wasn’t long however, before the crazed revivalists of American Christianity occupied Utah Territory in full force and vigor. Its crusaders grabbed hold of the issue of Mormonism’s Biblically justified practice of plural marriage and whittled it into a stout bludgeon. With this one weapon alone, nothing more than a few words on a piece of paper, Christian America beat Mormonism all to hell with it in the courts, Congress, and legislatures.
(Actually, there is no proscription of plural marriage in the Bible. It’s a Roman social custom the Church just picked up and it stuck. But Christianity doesn’t just rule out of the Bible, it has to be their Bible, and their interpretation of their Bible. Whoever they are at the time…)
When Mormonism looked to the Supreme Court to defend its marriage practices, the Supreme Court decided no, religious belief can’t be regulated, but religious practice can. It decided that Freedom of religion only extends insofar as said religion complies with accepted western social custom, and civil authority has every right 
to regulate or define matrimony according to prevailing social custom. In that day of course, this meant according to historical, Protestant Christian convention.
But prevailing social custom has changed radically since then, hasn’t it? Calvin doesn’t rule the streets of America any more—unless it’s Calvin Klein. Think about it you Lefties out there:
I’ll see your gay marriage and raise you two wives….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._United_States
http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/page.aspx?pid=664
Unlike its final solution to the “Indian Problem,” the forces of America’s Christian status-quo preserved their dominance over Mormonism through the pen, not the sword. After Mountain Meadows, after the Utah War, outraged Christian clergy and a few pandering politicians back east rallied t
hemselves into a flurry of protest over the Mormon assault upon free, white, "innocent" Christian citizens of the United States. For many reasons none of this outrage caught on nationally. The dirty secret of that is, nobody in civilized America felt obliged to start a full-scale war with Brigham Young out in the boonies over a few wagonloads of Arkansas hillbillies and a handful of Missouri pukes. Coldly stated, but entirely true. Consequently, no great national Christian vengeance was returned on behalf of the only casualties of the Utah war of 1857, 120 adult-only members of the California-bound immigrant Fancher Party, consisting mostly of the Arkansas-based Fancher and Baker families, and their hired Missouri trail hands.
Mormon Doctrine Part 4: Elder White and Brother Brown
In practice, rather a lot of LDS “doctrine” is and has been enforced on the level of “policy,” not “revelation.”
For the most part, the worst of historically inane or otherwise troubling Mormon pop “doctrines” we find now abandoned, had never been canonized or even officially cleared for teaching. But in several notable cases, some now embarrassingly obsolete doctrinal issues found in their day a great deal of official
sanction. Typically, as overtly wrong as these may have seemed even to most Mormons, these had for generations never been noted as terribly troubling dogma apparently just because Mormons are trained not to ask questions of themselves, let alone their leadership. Mormons are systematically bred and recruited into the religion because of their unusually keen desire to sublimate their individual inspiration and join the excitement and fellowship of a formal lifestyle program. Mormonism is increasingly a body of the sincerely faithful who are most happy, even eager, to surrender their individuality in favor of the safety of an authoritative external structure that tells them how to run their lives and promises them Eternal Glory if they obey the cultural mandates of the group. They are instinctively averse to making waves that might disturb the intellectual or spiritual gene pool. So on many doctrinal puzzles, Mormons patiently wait for the “Lord” to reveal the answer through His “chosen” leadership.
I take that back. Mormons are trained to ask one question: How can I ignore this seemingly asinine claim the church is making, and support the current Brethren in spite of any paradoxical, ironic, or contradictory departures from rational thought, the canon, or teachings from previous Brethren? This burden of faith is put upon the individual, rank-and-file member, and if the reigning Brethren seem unwilling or unable to satisfy any logical and theological dilemmas the fault lies with the individual, never the church leadership.
But the truth is, LDS leadership has self-groomed and self-recruited and selected itself proudly from the ranks of the humble, uneducated, unremarkable, unaccomplished, and yes, let’s admit it together proudly, the unintelligent for generations. The argument mitigating this selection proposes that they are however, humble and chosen, even if not overtly inspired, and God can reveal to them anything they need to know anyway. The argument is not without merit, but LDS canon proclaims “The Glory of God is Intelligence,” and that man can indeed understand the nature of God and man’s relationship to Him. Mormon canon, as recorded by Joseph Smith himself promises that we can reason with God as one man reasoneth with another. And yet, Mormonism perpetuates itself via a leadership that revels in its own mediocrity, and celebrates its deliberately cultured ignorance via a systematic litany of excuses and apologies–a soothing, anti-intellectual, populist philosophy, that embraces and promotes the inherent “spiritual” superiority of a leadership perpetually lacking in sophisticated mental processes.
http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/27528/Glory-of-God-is-intelligence.html
http://scripturalphraseguide.blogspot.com/2011/06/as-man-reasonethspeakethtalketh-with.html
The possession of no apparent personal charisma or talent, the lack of any clear ambition, and a simple character devoid of any noteworthy intellect, has been hailed and embraced in LDS orthodoxy as the ultimate leadership profile since Joseph Smith was slaughtered in his prime with a belly full of wine, his pen firing off revelations and curses from God, while double-wielding two blazing guns in righteous defense. Today, being humble and unremarkable is Mormonism’s supreme virtue. Even the former milktoasty Quaker, Brigham Young, had a drive and personal charisma that has never seen its like in the church since his passing.
Joseph Smith, contrary to the contemporary remaking of his character, was not just a humble farm boy. He was a highly intelligent and charismatic savant who recruited and attracted the best and brightest from similar stock to build his church. He was loud and brash and revolutionary and outspoken. Brigham Young had an entirely different style but he had many of the same qualities. Today however, the Mormon church is less concerned with gathering the best and brightest than with conserving its energy and resources for the more productive recruitment of a core demographic most likely to buy the “program.”
It must be conceded that while the best and brightest may be most fit for God’s work, but they also occasionally become rivals and dissidents. Mormons with good cause retain a rooted disdain for, and fear of, turncoats and possible “ites,” the likes of whom did them serious damage in the early days. Mormonism however, needs to get over Sidney Rigdon and company and move on. This safe and self-protecting approach has created a church-wide downward personality spiral in which God is increasingly given a less and less charismatic, less young, and far less eager and revolutionary core of potential priesthood candidates for leadership positions. That has its negative side. Unremarkable old farts build a church appealing mainly to other unremarkable old farts who tend to be capable of ministering only to the wants and needs of unremarkable farts, old and young alike.
As personality and intellectual qualities became de-emphasized to the point of burlesque in Mormon culture, Mormon callings became almost entirely based upon who fits the precast mold, who stands out the least as a human being and who makes the most compliant “Mormon,” who will reproduce more compliant “Mormons” like himself. Even when Mormonism selects the educated and accomplished, it selects those accomplished and educated along the IBM business model, or the quiet academic administrator, banker, insurance actuary or accountant, rather than any outstandingly brilliant artist, writer, performer, speaker, philosopher, religious professor or anyone who brings with them to the calling a trace of personal, individual genius and inspiration. The artistic and creative classes in all honesty, are a frighteningly loud, witty, cynical, independent, often sarcastic, incomprehensibly opinionated and outspoken subculture of humanity that Mormons are taught to openly shun and frequently belittle.
The original apostles, after choosing two candidates to replace Judas from their mere one-hundred and fifty-strong body of general followers, cast lots between these two, giving the Lord at least some small opportunity through Divinely manipulating a random element of chance, to give His direct input into the selection. (Acts 1: 15-23: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%201&version=NIV) Not so today. Today, the Lord can send His teaching angels to all the charismatic, spiritual prodigy farm kids toddling the woods of upstate New York as He sees fit, but none of them are going to be president of His church today. Today, that claim would only get them either permanently banned from baptism or excommunicated. You don’t apply, “run” or campaign for prophet. There are no human politics involved.
Today, a ponderous system of seniority eventually decrees who will lead the LDS church, and the only input God has into it is a vague “Providential” order to the otherwise random dates of call. He also is touted as having the habit killing off screw-ups or otherwise, all the guys in the line ahead of the One he wants. The church is forced to assume that rather than directly call Joseph Smith wherever he happens to be, today God predestines Joseph Smith to be born in Heber City Utah, and has his bishop call him to be a high priest at just the right time to be called by his stake president to an office like bishop, that attracts the area presidency to call him to be the next stake president or mission president which puts his name on a list of potential area presidents and then the apostles pull his name up to become a seventy, which puts him in line to join the Council of the Twelve when somebody dies and everyone moves up a peg, and so forth into the First Presidency. Finally, perhaps, if you survive with the longest period of seniority remaining above all the other apostles, and the current president dies, God is then allowed to seat you in the president’s chair.
Mormon leadership, not surprisingly, claims the Lord would never go outside this current Mormon system of ascendancy. The Lord would only talk to the Mormon Prophet. Mormonism doesn’t need bottom-up input at all. It’s all coming directly from the top-down. It doesn’t need outside advice. God gives all the advice inside and directly. But wouldn’t calling a man outside the system be just the test of modern LDS leadership Christ would be likely to throw at them? Isn’t that exactly what Jesus did when he preached to the elders of the temple? Didn’t Saul of Tarsus show up in Jerusalem with a direct calling from Christ, only to find himself kicked out into the boonies of Gentile Ville because the “Brethren” didn’t trust him?
Paul was a colorful character. An outsider. Way way outside. But today, the ideal personal profile of a typical
LDS “Prophet” would be a farm boy from a turkey ranch in Ephraim, who’s biggest thrill of his 87 years remains that big church league basketball game seventy years ago, in which he made the winning goal, just before he went on his mission to post-war Germany or someplace where he miraculously learned the language in three days and baptized whole villages–as he remembers it anyway. He would return to Utah, set out for the roaring metropolis of Salt Lake City, work as a baggage clerk on the railroad for a year or so, then receive his calling as a bishop, stake president, and after only a few years of adult, real-world experience (if you can call the Utah or Salt Lake Valleys the real world…) he would commence a lifetime of professional Mormonism as a general authority working his way up the higher quorums.
There was tremendous hoopla a few years back for example, when Howard W Hunter made president in June of 1994. Hunter was born in Idaho, made his life and family in California, and toured the world as a dance band leader in his youth. What a wild change that background that was seen to be. But he was 86, not in good health and his calling lasted but ten months. He passed away in March of 1995, and succession fell back to the comfortably inbred “chosen ones” along the Great Wasatch Front.
http://lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/controllers/potcController.jsp?leader=14&topic=facts
Today, the One-Fold mission of the church is not so much to bring people to Christ, as it is enculturating the world into the Utah social model. First you prove you can become a Utahn, then you get access to Jesus.
My point?
Absent a blazing natural leader hand-picked by God Personally, from all the earthly souls available, the best of the best, full of insight and zeal, present LDS leadership has remained almost entirely dependent upon rationalizing or harmonizing often convoluted and disparate teachings of previous LDS leadership without the input of direct revelation and with limited intellectual tools.
Sometimes even the desperately undiscerning and blindly obedient are confronted with what are obvious, incontrovertible doctrinal errors, policy mistakes or simple, cultural ignorance and stupidity that can’t be studied, pondered, prayed, faithed, and “testimonied” away. Once they have been smelled out however, fumigating these hereditary doctrinal brainfarts that have been stinking up historical Mormonism is a trying act of conscience and unpleasant for all concerned. The fear is always that "fixing" doctrinal errors in particular, damages more of the church than it repairs. First and foremost, confessing to the church membership that they’ve been taught bad doctrine for generations, can only diminish the contention that the "Brethren" are on top of their prophetic game. It poses the question: Ok, now how many other tangental, convoluted folk-doctrines and supporting arguments generated around, or connected to this bogus dogma are now also screwed up. And if this one thing is “wrong,” how much of the “core” doctrine of the church might also be “wrong.” It could become a doctrinal free-for-all, with contention and politicking from top to bottom and bottom to top of the church hierarchy. Joseph Smith won every doctrinal argument with, “God told me….” And that was that. But this level of certainty concerning Mormon policy and doctrine has been rather rare since Joseph’s mishap at Carthage Jail.
Partly due to their present scarcity of genuine “revelation,” the most heinous failure in the mind of LDS leadership would be if the Brethren left any opening for the charge that they made any decision however slight, based upon external pressure or succumbed to outside reasoning, or even that they buckled to the will and combined enlightenment of their own general membership. A perfect case in point is the “blacks and the priesthood policy.”
In 2002, the late LDS president Gordon B Hinckley, as part of his legacy campaign to poke Mormonism’s nose
out of the valley and have a little sniff around the world for a change, did an interview on German television. The presenter asked him pointedly why it took so long for the LDS church to allow Negroes to hold the priesthood.
Hinckley’s reply was, “I don’t know.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_KERZlwOXM&feature=related
In my first examination of Hinckley’s efforts, I beat up “Uncle Gordy” a little bit for going into these situations in a shockingly ignorant and unprepared state. On the other hand however, “I don’t know” is one of the most honest answers ever given by an LDS president to any question of doctrinal controversy in generations.
The quasi-“revelation” that ended the Negro priesthood ban, known as “Official Declaration 2” in the Doctrine and Covenants, http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng exposes a rather functional process in which the Brethren simply got together, did some praying, and eventually came to the same conclusion:
The Church never denied membership based on race (although slaves had to have their master’s permission to be baptized), and several black men were ordained to the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The first known black Latter-day Saint was "Black Pete", who joined the Church in Kirtland, Ohio, and there is some evidence that he held the LDS priesthood.[2] Other African Americans, including Elijah Abel in 1832, Joseph T. Ball in 1835 or 1836 (who also presided over the Boston Branch from 1844-1845), and Walker Lewis in 1843 (and probably his son, Enoch Lovejoy Lewis), were ordained to the priesthood during Smith’s lifetime.[3] William McCary was ordained in Nauvoo in 1846 by Apostle Orson Hyde.[4] Two of the descendants of Elijah Abel were also ordained Elders, and two other black men, Samuel Chambers and Edward Leggroan, were ordained Deacons.[5]
Early black members in the Church were admitted to the temple in Kirtland, Ohio, where Elijah Abel received the ritual of washing and anointing (see Journal of Zebedee Coltrin). Abel also participated in at least two baptisms for the dead in Nauvoo, Illinois, as did Elder Joseph T. Ball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_early_Mormonism
There had certainly been no modern revelation from God to bar Negroes from the LDS priesthood. Not even in Joseph Smith’s day, a time when the founding Mormon prophet had nearly daily conversations with God and said so openly. We can only assume that somewhere in the heat of being brutalized and persecuted as “nigger lovers” by packs of southern Christian rednecks like the “Knights of the Golden Circle,” precursor to the KKK, in Missouri and elsewhere, that a very stern influence was quietly put upon Joseph not by God, but by his advisors to knock off all the Negro fraternization because it was going to get them all killed.
http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/BMPB.html
http://www.allaboutmormons.com/ENG_racism_6.php
http://www.dearelder.com/index/inc_name/Mormon/title2/Black_Mormons
http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/homepage.html
http://mormonmatters.org/2008/06/08/30-years-of-authorized-black-priesthood/
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/032908/rel_262847386.shtml
Naturally, a lot of early Mormons, like Brigham Young in particular, were well reconciled to the longstanding Christian notion that Negroes were the cursed sons of Cain and marked forever as a servile and inferior race. The Southern Baptist Convention didn’t drop this article of faith until June of 1995 for example.
http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=899
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention
In the summer of 1833, W. W. Phelps published an article in the church’s newspaper, seeming to
invite free black people into the state [Missouri] to become Mormons, and reflecting "in connection with the wonderful events of this age, much is doing towards abolishing slavery, and colonizing the blacks, in Africa." ("Free People of Color"). Outrage followed Phelps’ comments, (Roberts [1930] 1965, p. 378.) and he was forced to reverse his position, which he claimed was "misunderstood", but this reversal did not end the controversy, and the Mormons were violently expelled from Jackson County, Missouri five months later in December 1833 (Bush & Mauss 1984, p. 55).
Coincidentally, on (December 16, 1833), Joseph Smith, Jr. dictated a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants stating that "it is not right that any man should be in bondage to another." (Covenant 101:79).
In 1835 , the Church issued an official statement indicating that because the United States government allowed slavery, the Church would not "interfere with bond-servants, neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor meddle with or influence them in the least to cause them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life, thereby jeopardizing the lives of men." (LDS D&C Covenant 134:12).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_early_Mormonism
While many LDS detractors try to claim that anti-Negro racism is an essential doctrine of LDS theology, and
that the basis for this prejudice is found in the uniquely Mormon, Book of Abraham, in the canonical “Pearl of Great Price,” the truth is that Christianity had been condemning Negroes to hell as the irredeemable, inherently damned seed of Cain for some 1820 years before Joseph Smith was ever in a position to give it a thought. Likewise, in Smith’s time, many of the most fundamentalist and adamant progenitors of today’s Christian critics of Mormonism’s “racism,” were eagerly buying and selling Cain’s children, forcing them into a lifetime of starvation and crippling hard labor, raping slave women for sport and breeding them for profit. Even more ironically, while the parents of the German commentator who accused 
Gordon B Hinckley of “racism” were learning how to spot non-Aryans in the Hitler Youth, and his grandparents were burning Jews in ovens and excusing the Third Reich’s humiliating defeat in 1932 to black Olympic champion Jesse Owens by claiming it was an unfair match between God-created man and a half-evolved ape, Mormonism had by way of comparison, merely interpreted its own available canonical evidence to mean that blacks were to barred from the priesthood, at least in this
lifetime.
Yes, there were Christian racial attitudes that carried into Mormonism and sprouted in Utah, nurtured by the lifelong world view of the former WASPS who settled in that big white bunker. These bigoted Christian beliefs were easily reinforced by not being around many Negroes and thus never having to deal with the question for another five score years or so. But never attribute to racism what you can easily attribute to ignorance.
The Mormon canonical evaluation of the curse of Cain breaks down to something like this:
1 Caine was cursed. The curse was primarily having his progeny banned from the priesthood. This comes almost entirely from the books of Moses and Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price:
…Now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of the priesthood, notwithstanding the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham, therefore my father was led away by their idolatry.
Unlike Christians, who’d damned Negroes to eternal slavery and hell, Mormons limited Cain’s curse to losing priesthood entitlement in mortal life, followed by exaltation. Other Christian sects at the time were doubting if Negroes had souls and could be saved at all, or if they were like animals (in most Christian theology) and incapable of salvation.
2 Cain was marked as a sign of protection. Blackness is not a mark of condemnation, it is the opposite, it is a warning from God to any who would persecute the children of Caine. This is found in Genesis:
10 And He said, What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground.
11 And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
12 When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you. You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
13 And Cain said to Jehovah, My punishment is greater than I can bear.
14 Now You have driven me out this day from the face of the ground, and from Your face I will be hidden; and I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.
15 And Jehovah said to him, Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold. And Jehovah put a mark on Cain, so that anyone who found him would not strike him.
http://online.recoveryversion.org/bibleverses.asp?fvid=8048&lvid=8053&ol=on
3 Black skin has been assumed to be a prominent feature of Cain’s mark, but more than that, the Negroid genetic features is also the mark. The curse pertains specifically to the genetic offspring of Cain, therefore skin color has nothing to do with the mark or the curse alone, it is a combined package of genetic features that indicates a descendant of Cain. For instance, many American and Eastern Indians have skin as black as
many Negroes, but Mormons have always held that native Americans are actually the blessed offspring of the Hebrew immigrant prophet Lehi, and actively recruited to the priesthood. Likewise, East Indians are actually Caucasians and their skin color has never been relevant to priesthood issues.
Mormon culture has in addition, clearly absorbed the Book of Mormon and longstanding Christian tradition that tries to define skin darkness in general as a punishment from God. But the Book of Mormon itself does not actually proscribe priesthood ordination or deny any other blessings on that basis.
Conversely, if the priesthood candidate’s skin were lily-white but had one fractional part of Cain’s DNA, the ban would still be in effect.
Specific, authoritative belief in the inherent inferiority of the Negro in Mormonism seems to originate primarily from Brigham Young, and was expanded upon by John Taylor, his successor, and others:
On another occasion, Young said, "You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind …. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race—that they should be the ‘servant of servants’; and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree."[4]
Brigham Young said this despite the LDS scripture verses that state people may be cursed unto the 3rd and 4th generation, but if any were to repent and make restitution they would be forgiven and the curse lifted.[5] This is reiterated in D&C 124:50&52 as well as Mosiah 13:13,14 and Deut 5:9,10.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
Young and others affirmed that Cain’s offspring were marked as easily spotted, permanent non-Levites, cut out of the line of the patriarchy–which is synonymous with the priesthood in both Old Testament and LDS theology–that would in time produce the Savior of Mankind, Jesus Christ. In short, Jesus would not be the descendant of, nor carry the blood in any small part, of the world’s first murderer—not because the sin would be transmitted downline, but according to many LDS theorists, to deny Cain and his children claim to or participation in the patriarchy or “priesthood” authority and lineage of Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Savior of Mankind, on any level.
But as usual, Brigham Young was making most of his observations about the Negro based upon a pressing period agenda ignored by modern critics:
Some researchers have suggested that the actions of William McCary in Winter Quarters, Nebraska led to Brigham Young’s decision to adopt the priesthood ban in the LDS Church. McCary was a half-African American convert who, after his baptism and ordination to the priesthood, began to claim to be a prophet and the possessor of other supernatural gifts.[5] He was excommunicated for apostasy in March 1847 and expelled from Winter Quarters.[6] After his excommunication, McCary began attracting Latter Day Saint followers and instituted plural marriage among his group, and he had himself sealed to several white wives.[5][6]
McCary’s behavior angered many of the Latter Day Saints in Winter Quarters. Researchers have stated that his marriages to his white wives "played an important role in pushing the Mormon leadership into an anti-Black position"[5] and may have prompted Young to institute the priesthood and temple ban on black people.[5][6][7] A statement from Young to McCary in March 1847 suggested that race had nothing to do with priesthood eligibility[8] and the earliest known statement about the priesthood restriction from any Mormon leader (including the implication that skin color might be relevant) was made by Apostle Parley P. Pratt a month after McCary was expelled from Winter Quarters.[6] Speaking of McCary, Pratt stated that he "was a black man with the blood of Ham in him which lineage was cursed as regards the priesthood".[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
After Brigham, the issue of the Negro and the priesthood did not clear up much:
Under John Taylor’s presidency, there was confusion regarding the origin of the racial policy. [Elijah]
Abel was living, breathing proof that an African American was ordained to the Priesthood in the days of Joseph Smith. His son, Enoch Abel, had also been conferred the Priesthood.[6] Joseph F. Smith said that Abel’s Priesthood had been declared null and void by Joseph Smith himself, though this seems to conflict with Joseph F. Smith’s teachings that the Priesthood could not be removed from any man without removing that man from the church.[7] From this point on Joseph Smith was repeatedly referred to as the author of many statements, which had actually been made by Brigham Young, on the subject of Priesthood restriction.[7]
And the plot thickens:
One of the justifications that some Latter-day Saints used for the discriminatory policy was that black individual’s pre-existence spirits were not as virtuous as white pre-existence spirits. For example, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith wrote: "According to the doctrine of the church, the negro because of some condition of unfaithfulness in the spirit — or pre-existence, was not valiant and hence was not denied the mortal probation, but was denied the blessing of the priesthood."[33]
Smith also reasoned that during the war in Heaven, some spirits would logically have been less valiant in following the Savior than others, therefore the priesthood was restricted from the least valiant.[34] However, Smith made clear that the book was his own personal opinion. Of the doctrine of the church, Smith said "The Mormon Church does not believe, nor does it teach, that the Negro is an inferior being. Mentally, and physically, the Negro is capable of great achievement, as great and in some cases greater than the potentiality of the white race. He can become a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, and he can achieve great heights."[35]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
Brigham Young however, had already answered this question:
When asked "if the spirits of Negroes were neutral in Heaven," Young responded, "No, they were not, there were no neutral [spirits] in Heaven at the time of the rebellion, all took sides …. All spirits are pure that came from the presence of God."[2] Prior to learning about [negro] Enoch Lewis’s marriage to a woman of European descent (December 1847) and subsequently enacting a ban on Negroes in the priesthood, he considered Walker Lewis "one of the best Elders."[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
McConkie however, when he went at the question in his allegedly “definitive” encyclopedia of Mormon “doctrine,” ignored Brigham Young, ignored his father-in-law’s disclaimer that his ramblings on the Negro were merely an unsupported personal opinion, and wrote this entry as if it were pulled straight out of the Mormon canon:
Of the two-thirds who followed Christ, however, some were more valiant than others… Those who
were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin (Moses 5:16-41; 12:22). Noah’s son Ham married Egyptus, a descendant of Cain, thus preserving the negro lineage through the flood (Abraham 1:20-27). Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. (Abra. 1:20-27.) The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them (Moses 7:8, 12, 22), although sometimes negroes search out the truth, join the Church, and become by righteous living heirs of the celestial kingdom of heaven. President Brigham Young and others have taught that in the future eternity worthy and qualified negroes will receive the priesthood and every gospel blessing available to any man. The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord….The negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow therefrom, but this inequality is not of man’s origin. It is the Lord’s doing.[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
But Bruce R McConkie not only ignored Brigham Young in favor of his father-in-law’s unauthoritative theories about Negro pre-mortal cowardice, he also ignored a prophet he had a personal problem with, David O McKay, who’d called the first edition of his Mormon Doctrine an embarrassingly errant hack job and tried to ban it:
In 1954, Church President David O. McKay taught: "There is not now, and there never has been a doctrine in this church that the negroes are under a divine curse. There is no doctrine in the church of any kind pertaining to the negro. We believe that we have a scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice someday will be changed. And that’s all there is to it.’[46]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
But then again, McKay was in turn openly disavowing the assertions of preceding church president George Albert Smith, who had strongly expressed rather opposite ideas about the issue, only a few years before McKay got the bully pulpit of Mormonism. In 1949, George Albert Smith’s First Presidency made a declaration that included the statement that the priesthood restriction was divinely commanded and not a matter of church policy. It declared:
The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of the principle. President Brigham Young said: "Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness? It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood, and the law of God. They will go down to death. And when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the holy priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will then come up and possess the priesthood, and receive all the blessings which we now are entitled to."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
George Albert Smith’s declaration on the status of the Negro in Mormonism goes on to state that the 
conditions in which people are born are affected by their conduct in a pre-mortal existence, although the details of the principle are said not to be known. It then says that the privilege of mortal existence is so great that spirits were willing to come to earth even though they would not be able to possess the priesthood. It concludes by stating, "Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes."
The one common load of totally human-originated BS in all these justifications for the denial of the Negro the priesthood, is the claim that the “less valiant” spirits in the war in heaven got to be Negroes. This is simply a device to alleviate any implied “original sin” element connected to Cain’s curse. It’s hard LDS doctrine that all men are born pure and sinless and guilty of nothing. Mormons teach that all mankind can not only be “saved” but all of mankind are exaltable children of God. This is the central theme of Joseph Smith’s restored “Gospel.” Therefore, to also preach that any otherwise qualified candidate for priesthood ordination should be denied this authority simply because of patriarchal lineage—in other words, race—screamed errency from the day it was first openly declared. Church leadership from Brigham Young on down desperately scrambled through the years to invent better and better sophistry to make it sound “fair.”
The contention that some of God’s spiritual children screwed up just a little bit before being shipped into a womb was, as I keep saying, pulled right out of somebody’s would-be prophetic arse. And in this case, it was not Brigham Young’s prophetic arse, even inasmuch as his was certainly an ample one and a prolific generator of early Mormon prophetic vapors. It’s probably down to John Taylor, as well as the corresponding notion that blacks could only be servants in the Celestial Kingdom that began to develop along with this system of excuses.
What would have been consistent with LDS doctrine–just for laughs–would be to say that egroes are spirits
who are guaranteed a place in the Celestial Kingdom, like those spirits who, “volunteer” as it is popularly supposed, to be sent to infirm human bodies that die in birth or before the age of accountability, or those born with physical and mental handicaps. These doomed and imperfect human bodies it has long been maintained, were always occupied by the most pure and valiant spirits who have already earned their entry into the Celestial Kingdom. They serve their sentence in mortality as a technical requirement for Eternal Glory, just marking time without being expected to fight or labor or prove themselves. It’s the pre-mortal slackers, screwups and layabouts, who actually need the learning opportunity that mortal priesthood service and responsibility offers them. That theory you could rationalize with Mormon canon and other doctrine.
But it never would have occurred to LDS leadership that not having to go home teaching and still eventually get received into Paradise might actually be a blessing.
The difference between me and a Brigham Young or a John Taylor I suppose, is that I am well aware that as logical as that just sounded, and as convenient as it is to be able to rationally explain away the Negro-priesthood problem, unlike many of these early LDS leaders, I am always well aware of when I am blowing smoke out of my arse. And I don’t have a title that would presume to authorize me to transubstantiate methane into scripture.
And then again, at the root of it all you have those darned Bible verses hanging you up even without all the Mormonism. Mormonism in truth only mitigated Cain’s curse and explained how his posterity made it through the Great Flood. The curse itself in basic Christianity went all the way back to the Beginning, to Genesis.
Apostle Harold B. Lee blocks policy change
In 1969 church apostle Harold B. Lee blocked the LDS Church from rescinding the racial restriction policy.[47] Church leaders voted to rescind the policy at a meeting in 1969. Lee was absent from the meeting due to travels. When Lee returned he called for a re-vote, arguing that the policy could not be changed without a revelation.[47]
Church president statement in 1972
Harold B. Lee, president of the church, stated in 1972: "For those who don’t believe in modern revelation there is no adequate explanation. Those who do understand revelation stand by and wait until the Lord speaks…It’s only a matter of time before the black achieves full status in the Church. We must believe in the justice of God. The black will achieve full status, we’re just waiting for that time."[48]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
I personally tend to look at Harold B Lee as just being something of a prick about the whole issue here. But he has a point. Sometimes God’s lack of open communication puts the entire collected body of LDS general authorities, as clearly shown here, sitting around the conference table, trying not to complain or contend, waiting for God to solve their problem for them. You can’t blame Harold B Lee for demanding that somebody pony up a genuine revelation or shut the hell up about it. I empathize with Lee’s demand for a tangible vision, a visitation, a good old Joseph Smith-type revelation from God. Those had long been in short supply. And Harold B Lee was quite correct in believing that without God directly clarifying the issue, even if none of them really knew why the ban was still being enforced, it was a tradition clearly in the canon and they were bound by it:
Ban as an unknowable mystery
David O. McKay said: "From the beginning of this dispensation, Joseph Smith [actually, there is no reliable evidence that Joseph Smith ever taught this doctrine, and in fact Smith ordained several negroes to the priesthood personally] and all succeeding presidents of the church have taught that negroes, while spirit children of a common Father, and the progeny of our earthly parents Adam and Eve, were not yet to receive the priesthood, for reasons which we believe are known to God, but which He has not made fully known to man."[44]
[edit]Attribution to human error
Although not refuting his belief that the policy came from the Lord, apostle Spencer W. Kimball acknowledged in 1963 that it could have been brought about through an error on man’s part. In 1963, he said, "The doctrine or policy has not varied in my memory. I know it could. I know the Lord could change his policy and release the ban and forgive the possible error which brought about the deprivation."[45]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
1978 Revelation on Priesthood:
Spencer W. Kimball became LDS church president in 1973, when Harold B Lee was
taken out of his place suddenly by a God whom we might imagine was responding to Lee’s demand for a "revelation" by sending him a very direct message about standing in the way of repealing the priesthood Negro ban. Kimball took general conference on the road, holding area and regional conferences all over the world. He announced many new temples to be built, many of them “McTemples,” downsized facilities that could do all the work at half the price and double the availability around the world of temple ordinances. This included a temple in São Paulo, Brazil. There, church leaders realized the impossibility of determining bloodlines in an incredibly mixed-race environment for the first time.[63]
On June 8, 1978, the First Presidency issued an official declaration, now a part of the standard works of the church, which contained the following statement:
He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the church may receive the Holy Priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that follows there from, including the blessings of the temple. Accordingly, all worthy male members of the church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color. Priesthood leaders are instructed to follow the policy of carefully interviewing all candidates for ordination to either the Aaronic or the Melchizedek Priesthood to insure that they meet the established standards for worthiness.[64]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
In 1978 Bruce R. McConkie had some backpedalling to do:
There are statements in our literature by the early brethren which we have interpreted to mean that
the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things, and people write me letters and say, "You said such and such, and how is it now that we do such and such?" And all I can say to that is that it is time disbelieving people repented and got in line and believed in a living, modern prophet. Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world…. We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept. We have now had added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don’t matter any more…. It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
You might have thought that old Bruce R would have argued against changing this priesthood eligibility policy, given his support for his father-in-law’s various doctrinal theories, and McConkie’s strong affection for established canon. On the contrary, in the final debates he argued strongly in favor of dropping the restrictions on worthy Negro males:
When the priesthood ban was discussed in 1978, apostle Bruce McConkie argued for its change using the Mormon scripture and the Articles of Faith. The Third Article states that "all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel."(Articles of Faith 1:3) From the Book of Mormon he quoted "And even unto the great and last day, when all people, and all kindreds, and all nations and tongues shall stand before God, to be judged of their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil— If they be good, to the resurrection of everlasting life; and if they be evil, to the resurrection of damnation. (3 Nephi 26:4-5) The Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price states that Abraham‘s seed "shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal." (Abraham 2:11) According to his son, Joseph F. McConkie, these scriptures played a great part in changing the policy.[19]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
There were church leaders however, who embraced Brigham Young’s take on the Negro’s mortal disposition fa![john-taylor[1]](http://lrwhitney.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/john-taylor1.jpg "john-taylor[1]")
r more enthusiastically than McConkie:
In 1881, church president John Taylor said "And after the flood we are told that the curse that had been pronounced upon Cain was continued through Ham’s wife, as he had married a wife of that seed. And why did it pass through the flood? Because it was necessary that the devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God; and that man should be a free agent to act for himself, and that all men might have the opportunity of receiving or rejecting the truth, and be governed by it or not according to their wishes and abide the result; and that those who would be able to maintain correct principles under all circumstances, might be able to associate with the Gods in the eternal worlds." (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 22 page 304).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine
While nobody picked up and ran with Taylor’s “Negro-as-Satan’s-agents” allusion as a serious doctrinal contention, Taylor’s administration was the first to propose (against the late Brother Brigham’s objections) that Negroes spiritually had it coming for being “less valiant” as pre-mortal crusaders. That stuck. And far loonier things have been said or at lest recorded and attributed to noted authorities. Some of these linger on in Mormonism at least conceptually. All of them sting of residual Calvinism.
Apostle Mark E. Petersen gave a speech on this subject: "God has commanded Israel not to
intermarry. To go against this commandment of God would be in sin. Those who willfully sin with their eyes open to this wrong will not be surprised to find that they will be separated from the presence of God in the world to come. This is spiritual death…. The reason that one would lose his blessings by marrying a Negro is due to the restriction placed upon them. ‘No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood.’ (He’s quoting Brigham Young here.) It does not matter if they are one-sixth Negro or one-hundred and sixth, the curse of no Priesthood is the same. If an individual who is entitled to the Priesthood marries a Negro, the Lord has decreed that only spirits who are not eligible for the Priesthood will come to that marriage as children. To intermarry with a Negro is to forfeit a ‘Nation of Priesthood holders.’" Source: Race Problems — As They Affect The Church, Address by Mark E. Petersen at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, August 27, 1954.
Again we hear from Apostle Mark E. Petersen: "The discussion on civil rights, especially over the last 20 years, has drawn some very sharp lines. It has blinded the thinking of some of our own people, I believe. They have allowed their political affiliations to color their thinking to some extent, and then, of course, they have been persuaded by some of the arguments that have been put forth…. We who teach in the Church certainly must have our feet on the ground and not to be led astray by the
philosophies of men on this subject…. "I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the negro is after. He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn’t just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn’t that he just desires to go the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage. That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feelings to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have. Remember the little statement that we used to say about sin, ‘First we pity, then endure, then embrace.’…. "Now let’s talk about segregation again for a few moments. Was segregation a wrong principle? when the Lord chose the nations to which the spirits were to come, determining that some would be Japanese and some would be Chinese and some Negroes and some Americans, He engaged in an act of segregation…. When he told Enoch not preach the gospel to the descendants of Cain who were black, the Lord engaged in segregation. When He cursed the descendants of Cain as to the Priesthood, He engaged in segregation…. "Who placed the Negroes originally in darkest Africa? Was it some man, or was it God? And when He placed them there, He segregated them…. "The Lord segregated the people both
as to blood and place of residence. At least in the cases of the Lamanites and the Negro we have the definite word of the Lord Himself that he placed a dark skin upon them as a curse — as a punishment and as a sign to all others. He forbade intermarriage with them under threat of extension of the curse. And He certainly segregated the descendants of Cain when He cursed the Negro as to the Priesthood, and drew an absolute line. You may even say He dropped an Iron curtain there…. "Now we are generous with the negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves. I think the Lord segregated the Negro and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing — what God hath separated, let not man bring together again." Source: Race Problems — As They Affect The Church, Address by Mark E. Petersen at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah,August 27, 1954.
…
The following is a quote from the then Mr. Kimball (Spencer W.), speaking at the General Conference
meeting, October, 1960. "I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today…. The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. "At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl–sixteen–sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents–on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather….These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated." Improvement Era, December 1960, pp. 922-923.
…
"Of the thousands of children born today, a certain proportion of them went to the Hottentots of the south seas, thousands went to Negro mothers, thousands to beautiful white Latter-day Saint Mothers."-Melvin J. Ballard
B.H. Roberts-the Seventy’s Course in Theology: "That the negro is
markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation."
The Juvenile Instructor (a Church magazine): "Last in order stands the Negro race, the lowest in intelligence and the most barbarous of all the children of men."
Also, the LDS children’s Juvenile Instructor suggests that the Polynesians also were cursed with dark skin: "We are asked if the natives of New Zealand and of the Samoan society and Sandwich Islands are descendants of the Nephites (white people) or of the Lamanites (American Indians)….It is plain from the history of the Book of Mormon that this dark skin has been brought upon them by transgression. Whether this transgression occurred before they left this (American) continent or afterwards is not clear." (The Juvenile Instructor, vol. 30, p. 129.)
And ironically, while Mark E Peterson and apostolic friends are dropping racial bombshells:
In 1958, Joseph Fielding Smith published Answers to Gospel Questions which stated "No church or other organization is more insistent than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that the negroes should receive all the rights and privileges that can possibly be given to any other in the true sense of equality as declared in the Declaration of Independence." He continues to say they should not be barred from any type of employment or education, and should be free "to make their lives as happy as it is possible without interference from white men, labor unions or from any other source."[49] In the 1963 General Conference, Hugh B. Brown stated: "it is a moral evil for any person or group of persons to deny any human being the rights to gainful employment, to full educational opportunity, and to every privilege of citizenship". He continued: "We call upon all men everywhere, both within and outside the church, to commit themselves to the establishment of full civil equality for all of God’s children. Anything less than this defeats our high ideal of the brotherhood of man."[49]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
It’s easy for the ignorant and self-interested to paint Mormonism with the Lefty’s favorite tar brush of common racism. In fact, since the Civil Rights Movement set upon the mission of bringing down the LDS church, it is even held that Mormons are close friends with the KKK, the favorite bugaboo of the “enlightened” Left. These slanders, when repeated widely, naturally become the assumptions of rational, fair-minded people as well. Frankly, Mormonism has given even the most forgiving investigator cause for suspicion. But Mormonism and its attitude toward the Negro, isn’t really a Right-Left, racist/colorblind debate in the usual Christian American sense:
Many of the members of the anti-Mormon mob that murder the first President of the Church, Joseph Smith, are members of a secret racist society called the "Knights of the Golden Circle." After the Civil War the organization is outlawed. A few members of the Knights of the Golden Circle found a new organization called the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.—1844
(See BlackMormon)Soon after its formation, an LDS apostle writes that the KKK will prove a "curse" upon America.—1868
(See BlackMormon)The KKK holds anti-Mormon meetings and, in the south, kills and in some cases tortures Mormon missionaries.—1870s-1890s
(See Blazing Crosses, pp.11ff)J. Golden Kimball receives a telegram indicating that the Ku Klux Klan again plans to torture Mormon missionaries in the South if they don’t leave immediately.—1891
(See BlackLDS)When a nation-wide tour of the stage version of "The Clansman," a story that insults blacks and glorifies the KKK as white heroes, arrives in Utah, the anti-Mormon "Salt Lake Tribune" praises the production. The Church-owned "Deseret News," however, while recognizing that the play is well done in technical terms, states that the Klan is not to be praised, for it "rode about the country at night killing or torturing negroes and their sympathizers…[and] became a band of idle, dissolute and vicious individuals who entered upon a career of brutality and violence that appalled the country."—1908
(See Deseret News, Nov. 2, 1908)The Church owned "Deseret News" calls the KKK "an insult and a menace to orderly government" that would lead "to riot and bloodshed."—1920s
(See Deseret News, 23 Dec., 1920)The "Salt Lake Tribute" [the official organ of Christian anti-Mormon reformers] accepts KKK advertising and notices, but the "Deseret News" refuses and only writes of the KKK to condemn it in editorials.—1920s
"So far as its operations are known–its secrecy, its mummery, its terrorism, its lawlessness–it is condemned…These mountain communities of ours have no place whatever for it in their social scheme of things…[he who tries to establish it among us] should be made emphatically to understand that his local endeavors will be worse than wasted, and his objects [goals] are detested, and his [absence] is preferred to his company. The people of Utah have no taste or patience for such criminal nonsense…"—1921
(See Deseret News, July 23, 1921)Because of the Church’s condemnation of the KKK, the KKK "Grand Wizard" of Wyoming considers the Church it’s "greatest enemy." "In the Realm of Utah and scattered over the West in general, we have another enemy, which is more subtle and far more cunning [than other anti-KKK groups] in carrying its efforts against this organization…the Latter-day Saint Religion!"—1923
(See Papers Read at the Meetings of Grand Dragons, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1923, pp.112-3)http://www.allaboutmormons.com/ENG_racism_6.php
http://www.dearelder.com/index/inc_name/Mormon/title2/Black_Mormons
The Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News are fascinatingly blatant records of Mormon-v-anti-Mormon, meaning Christian populations of the State of Utah:
1908: The stage version of Thomas Dixon’s bestselling novel The Clansman, which portrayed blacks as ignorant and ravenous brutes, and glorified the KKK as white heroes, had toured all over the United States. Finally, the tour came to Salt Lake City. The Gentile (non-mormon) newspaper in the city, The Salt Lake Tribune, praised both the play and its message. The Mormon paper, the Deseret News, said that while the play itself was "an excellent production" in technical terms, the Klan was not a heroic organization as the play portrayed, but "rode about the country at night killing or torturing negroes and their sympathizers" in a "reign of terror" and "became a band of idle, dissolute and vicious individuals who entered upon a career of brutality and violence that appalled the country."(Deseret News, Nov. 2, 1908).
1916: The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah’s Gentile (non-mormon) and Anti-Mormon newspaper (which almost daily contained anti-Mormon articles) wrote a critique of the silent movie Birth of a Nation; which was a film version of the play The Clansmen. The Tribune wrote that "Mob violence and outlawry [by blacks] are depicted, followed by spectacular vies of the Ku Klux Klansmen who organized secretly to control the negroes through their superstitious fears. The Klansmen were fearless night-riders and they wore white shrouds. Acts of vengeance were perpetrated [upon blacks] under the cover of darkness, and the pictures show clearly why such extreme measures were necessary for the continuance of law and order." (Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 1916)
1920: The KKK was "an insult and a menace to orderly government" which would lead "to riot and bloodshed". (Deseret News, 23 Dec., 1920)
And still, decades later, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, following the confused LDS pattern of mutually exclusive statements on the Negro issue, at the same time you had David O McKay, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Hugh B Brown embracing the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand, you had Cleon Skousen and his apostolic pal ET Benson at some other pulpit calling the Civil Rights Movement an arm of Communist Aggression:
My grandfather [ET Benson] saw the U.S. civil rights movement, in larger conspiratorial context, as a
leading element in a vast, ominous and active Communist plot designed to “overthrow established government” through “widespread anarchy,” the sparking of “a nation-wide civil war” and the assassination of “anti-Communist leaders of both races.”
He warned Americans: “It is happening here! . . . THE COMMUNIST PROGRAM FOR REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN HAS BEEN IN PROGRESS FOR MANY YEARS AND IS FAR ADVANCED.”
This Moscow-orchestrated plan, he declared from his General Conference pulpit, was being implemented on American soil “[u]sing unidentified Communist agents and non-Communist sympathizers in key positions in government, in communications media and in mass organizations such as labor unions and civil rights groups [which] demand more and more government power as the solution to all civil rights problems. Total government is the objective of Communism. Without calling it by name, [they] build Communism piece by piece through mass pressures for Presidential decrees, court orders and legislation which appear to be aimed at improving civil rights and other social reforms.”
Ezra Taft Benson saw the American South as the initial battleground in Communist efforts to establish a foothold before spreading northward. These attempts, he warned, were designed for "splitting away the ‘Black Belt,’ those Southern states in which the Negro held a majority, and calling them a Negro Soviet Republic.” He warned Americans to be on guard for African-Americans who had “migrated to the Northern states,” where they had likewise “applied this same strategy to the so-called ‘ghetto’ areas in the North.”
He reassured White patriots, however, that even “[i]f Communism comes to America . . . the Negro represents only 10 percent of the population. In any all-out race war which might be triggered, there isn’t a chance in the world that Communist-led Negro guerilla units could permanently hold on to the power centers of government, even if they could capture them in the first place.”
Well, that was then and this is now. Except the LDS church has never authoritatively justified, apologized for,
or retracted the many boldly racist theories and observations its leadership at least in singular cases has made over the generations. Was it racism in the dictionary sense? Yes, in many cases it was, but not because of the 
priesthood restriction itself so much, as Mormon leadership’s clearly human and bigoted attempts to rationalize this vaguely canonical restriction by inventing supplemental folk-doctrine and applying faulty and biased “scientific” or “empirical” evidence to prove the Negro race deserving of the ban. They did this, because otherwise, the knew either they or God would look petty and unfair.
The curse of Cain is however, still stuck solid in the Christian canon. Christians interpreted the curse to be a black skin and being a perpetual slave. It’s clarified to mean only a restriction from the priesthood in Mormon canon. But you’re stuck with a scriptural curse on Cain and his descendants either way. If none of the Mormon canon existed you’d still have an accursed Cain. God’s curse was indeed Biblically argued as justification for institutionalizing American slavery–but not by Joseph Smith or the Mormons. That was Christian America who did that. Until they killed him for it, Ol’ Joe Smith was in fact running for US president on an Abolitionist platform.
As the LDS church leadership later evolved, rising out of the battleground of an American Constitutional struggle over slavery, they began inventing theological justifications for their own canonical interpretations of the Negro curse. Large factions of the congregation and leadership had always found the Negro priesthood ban embarrassing and difficult to rationalize with foundational Mormon theology. Reacting to these growing, enlightened objections, LDS leadership at times proposed justifications that were just plain ignorant, bigoted and arrogant, and then pounded their points home more and more fervently to silence the rising protests.
Institutional racism is defined as any time you have an organized system that believes in a fundamental genetic and intellectual inferiority of any given race. Mormonism, like most of Christianity, from its highest leaders down, either in whole or in part, for many generations fell into that category relative to their floppy positions on the Negro. You can’t argue otherwise.
My own pragmatic explanation of lifting the Mormon priesthood ban on the Negro would be that in modern times the genetic markers are so compromised that there are no pure lines on any side of the question today, anywhere, anyway. A more
obvious proposal, and one I as an unschooled ignoramus find embarrassingly absent in official LDS apologies, is that Christ was born two-thousand years ago and therefore, since we’re well past that phase of the Atonement, been there, done that–the whole point of excluding Cain’s line from Christ’s priesthood order, and/or keeping Christ’s line pure of Cain’s dirty deeds for whatever reason, was resolved with the birth of the promised Messiah. Even the Gentiles became the chosen people at that point. But that’s just me sensibly preserving my “testimony” by trying to make sense of Mormonism. That burden is upon me, for some reason, and it shouldn’t be.
For those of us who know a little bit of history, a dismissive, "We’re beyond that now," from Mormon leadership, as Uncle Gordy would often say when waving off these sort of confused doctrinal reversals, isn’t very satisfying. It’s mostly insulting. And so we try to do the work of patching up the "Gospel" the Brethren should be doing for us, by ourselves.
I confess. You’re correct out there brothers and sisters. I can hear you grumbling about me to yourselves. I shouldn’t be the one taking up the assignment of this sort of doctrinal analysis
. It’s not my calling to tie up all the loose and frayed ends, define and harmonize all the seemingly random bits of the Mormon “Gospel” floating around the church.
It’s just that nature abhors a vacuum.
Mormon Doctrine Part 3: Infallibility
Mormonism as taught through the revelations of Joseph Smith answers most of the really hard questions dubious Christians have historically had about mankind’s basic relationship to God. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first “Christian” to be skeptical about Plato’s “Perfect Being” theories. Joseph Smith “revealed” if you will, that God and his Son are two separate Deities, their third companion is a Spirit, we’re all part of the same family, spiritual and physical sons and daughters of God. The Father and Son are “Perfected” humans, and we can be “Perfected” under their mentoring as well. We’re here to learn and grow and be more like our Father in Heaven, and so forth. These lost “plain and precious” truths are the sort of thing Joseph Smith was on about when we spoke of the “fullness” of the gospel. Not even Joseph Smith however, and his direct dictation from Deity actually restored all knowledge about everything God has in store for every facet and condition of mankind.
The embarrassing fact for those Mormons harping on the notion that the LDS “Prophets” of modern times make the church inherently superior, is that even by Mormon standards, Jesus has actually not maintained an ongoing stream of “new” revelation. He ultimately hasn’t revealed a whole lot more to modern Mormon prophets than he did to his contemporary ancient apostles, no matter how much today’s Mormon leadership imagines to the contrary. And, of what He has or could reveal to modern man, even Mormon leadership accepts that rather a lot of possible oncoming “revelation,” is still not meant to be openly broadcast anyway. Joseph Smith really only spoke of restoring those few but vital, key bits of Divine knowledge that had been lost, bent, or eroded through generations of the Church trying to fill in the blanks with Platonism and human “logic.” During Smith’s era of restoration, naturally, the volume of “new” or actually “restored” information came in a flood. Then it was all written down more or less, and the flood trickled off to just an occasional drip, after Joseph Smith. Because Joseph Smith had done his job. Which was restoring the church and those missing bits of data needed to run it properly.
Daily communication with God has never been the normal state of human condition. It has not so been since man was cast out of the Garden of Eden. It is not part of the deal, even for Mormons, even for Mormon “Prophets.”
For example, Moses came out of nowhere historically speaking, became a major prophet, wrote half the Old Testament, worked plagues and miracles, talked to God regularly, wandered around for 40 years in the desert, led his people to the Promised Land, and then, as my Norse ancestors would say, at this point Moses leaves the saga. He just disappears. From that day to this, thousands upon thousands of years, there have been only a handful of “prophets” who rose to anything like the stature of Moses. Each prophet before and after Moses likewise rose to the specific Biblically recorded task God had set for him, jotted down any specific task-related instructions which got added to the canon, and when the job was done they died, sealed their testimony with blood, or otherwise were never heard of again. We do not, just to make the point clear, ever read in the Biblical records of a string of functionary, custodial “Prophet” replacements who after the big prophet was gone and the main job was over, hung around and kept busy administering the program in an organized church structure. There are no biblical records where Aaron takes over for Moses, and then writes down a completely different spin on the “golden calf” episode from his own perspective. You don’t read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and get to sort through each writer’s opinions of what the other three had to say about this subject or that. Yes, that all came later in the greater Christian Church, but it came from Church Fathers and Apologists and Clergy, none of whom claimed to be a “living prophet.” Granted, they acted as if they were and considered themselves infallible anyway.
If we take the existing Christian canon as the Word of God in any case, we can only assume that with a few exceptions, we’re still reading what Moses or Daniel or Ezekiel or Jeremiah wrote thousands of years ago because there wasn’t much God needed to add to it till the next job came up hundreds or thousands of years later and a new prophet needed calling. And in the Biblical record, it seems clear that each succeeding “Prophet” was only concerned with what he was doing for God and His people at the time, not harmonizing a whole prophetic tradition, or bringing everyone up to current status in the dogma department.
Now, it can be argued that preparing for the arrival of Jesus Christ was the whole point of the Old Testament prophets, and He did in fact harmonize the canon to that point by showing up personally and telling us all how the story ended. You could easily assume that His arguments and commentaries that became the New Testament do indeed take Christianity up to the current status. To accept that view however, you’d have to believe that Jesus was a very poor writer and had no sense of organization at all. He never wrote anything down for one thing. All his apostles got tortured and murdered to death in less than a lifetime, and his organization has been terrorizing itself ever since.
In Mormonism’s “most correct of any book on earth,” the Book of Mormon, you have exactly the history of prophet-to-prophet hand-offs combined with prophetic condensation, abridgement, clarification and preservation you’d expect in a real God-Guided system. Those prophets got wiped out as well, but they were more devout scribblers than their Old World equivalents obviously. But the Book of Mormon, all boasts aside, frankly doesn’t add much to the Biblical canon in terms of new and revelatory doctrinal points. Most of the Book of Mormon’s value lies in it’s existence. It’s a conceptual proof that God has other sheep, that God speaks to other prophets, that a modern prophet revealed and translated it, that the canon is still open. What’s recorded in the Book of Mormon could never be more revolutionary or revelatory than that it exists at all.
The problem we have with Mormonism in the area of ongoing prophecy, is that starting with Joseph Smith, you do now in fact have a highly structured bureaucracy leading a permanently constituted organizational “Church” structure. Its president takes upon himself the title of “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” and then uncomfortably waits for the next church-related job God feels a need to personally take an interest in. It’s like the Book of Mormon system only it happens in real-time. You end up with caretakers making perfunctory notes for posterity just to say they did something, as did Omni and Jarom and Enos, just handing down the book generation after generation, sometimes adding a note about how nothing much was happening so they’re just passing down the records like they were told to do. This, honestly speaking, is exactly what the “Restored” Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints) has become since the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. This is not necessarily a reflection upon LDS leadership. Joseph Smith was shot all to hell by Christian mobs to shut him up and kill the movement, and perhaps that was part of God’s plan, but it is mostly a good indication that God generally calls any given “major” prophet to do a specific job and then whatever happens to him afterward just happens, because the job is done. In Smith’s case the claimed job was “Restoration,” and having “Restored” the structure and key doctrines necessary, we can assume that not only was Joseph Smith done with the assignment, but God was fairly happy with the wisdom and knowledge He’d revealed in the process, and therefore Smith’s successors could expect not a whole lot of additional conversation with Deity until conditions according to God’s timetable and desires warranted it.
Then again, the whole point of being a mortal—something God has amply revealed to both ancient and modern prophets—is for us to work out our own Salvation by making our own choices. The whole point of mortality is lost if God instructs mankind point-by-point and item-by-item what to do, what to think, and how to live all day every day. Mormon canon teaches of obedience, but the principle of obedience is a choice based upon faith, not an absolutely guaranteed, Divinely decreed and spelled-out formula to follow because it’s proven to “earn” you a certain reward based upon performance.
What Joseph Smith actually restored was the “Church,” a system of mortal government, through which God
allows man to regulate man’s own participation in God’s Kingdom. God doesn’t need the Church. Man needs the Church. The Church is a mortal institution run by and for mortals. The difference between Mormonism and any other “Christian” church, is authority. Mormonism, if you care to buy it, claims to have direct authority from Jesus Christ to administer to His believers in His name. That’s authority mind you. Along with authority comes power and inspiration, and there’s where it gets a bit sticky. The Mormon hierarchy holds the “keys,” which means the token authority to talk directly to God, to commune with angels, the Holy Spirit, or see visions, heal the sick, raise the dead, any of all that miraculous stuff. I fully believe that the current LDS president for example, could talk to Jesus personally. I take that on faith. But I don’t have to believe that he doesn’t do that however, because he has said he doesn’t. I therefore know he doesn’t talk to God and Angels. That is not faith based. So what I know for a fact is, that Jesus doesn’t sit in the Salt Lake Temple and directly administer HIs church. And more to the point, Jesus isn’t up in the Church Office Building passing on daily lessons to the Brethren about bigger and bigger doctrinal concepts just for entertainment purposes.
http://www.ldschurchnews.com/media/attachments/53.pdf
The Church is about salvation. It’s about serving Christ and feeding His sheep. You just don’t need to know that much to accomplish this mission. Jesus doesn’t need to come down and micromanage the operation. And sure, by the time you read this some LDS “Prophet” may say he’s had a face-to-face with Jesus, and I’ll gladly accept this as the truth if and when it happens. It simply hasn’t happened since Joseph Smith to date.
Mormon priesthood authority is an exercise in on-the-job self-training. The various LDS authorities over time, have always been rather diverse in the way they trained themselves, and the way they defined their system of government. Originally, whatever Joseph Smith said about anything was “doctrine.” That was pretty much the whole early LDS organizational structure. What is or isn’t “LDS “doctrine” since then has always been inherently uncertain apart from somebody openly claiming a “revelation” and then having it unanimously sustained by the three ruling Mormon priesthood bodies, the Quorum of the Seventy, the Council of Twelve, and the First Presidency. Short of the completion of this canonization process, there have always existed “gospel hobbies” that general authorities, BYU religion professors, and even the general membership have been allowed to play with. These “mysteries” are pondered through generations and infiltrate many levels of official and semi-official LDS “theology,” but have no basis in revelation or authority and thus are not “doctrine.” This remains true, even though the likes of Bruce R McConkie might have sternly and apparently “authoritatively” argued his own unique brilliance here there and everywhere for however many years.
And down a hundred rungs of the LDS doctrinal evolutionary ladder from bona-fide, half-credentialed
doctrinal pretenders like Bruce R McConkie, hangs the likes of one W Cleon Skousen–by his prehensile tail probably. Skousen made his fame first by becoming a “Commie Hunter,” and gaining a hysterical popularity in the dry little Salt Lake Valley back in the McCarthy era, and this he used as a platform for promoting his bogus doctrinal babblings as well, assisted again by virtue of his lame BYU half-title and his chumminess with a couple of key church presidents. But even his most staunch and authoritative supporters in the First Presidency ultimately turned their backs on Skousen. And yet, Skousen remains protected even today from those who would sully his legacy. Even when McConkie gave his lecture on modern heresy at BYU in 1980, Skousen and I were both in attendance. I always wondered why Brother Bruce didn’t just name Cleon as a “Modern Heretic” from the lectern and be done with it. Professor Eugene England unfortunately didn’t have Skousen’s connections, so it was England who got the infamous dressing-down letter from McConkie instead.
Let’s not pretend there aren’t any “politics” in the church.
http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6770
http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england
If you believe that the LDS “Prophet” talks directly to God, if you believe that’s the whole point of the church, and that the entire LDS governmental system was established by Joseph Smith merely so it could rubber-stamp its approval of anything the “Prophet” comes up with, I submit that you are a fool. And Bruce R McConkie agrees with me apparently. Actually, McConkie would call you a damned fool.
If you think any half-arsed theory belched out in a stake fireside by any given LDS “prophet,” in the last two centuries or so is living scripture, or that any jackass book written by some LDS prophet’s best buddy, or some little tome once given some offhand praise by The Brethren, singularly, or en-masse, rates as “Mormon doctrine,” you’re basically a heretic. This sort or confusion and anarchy is not the church Joseph Smith established, and definitely not the church God had in mind when He “revealed” a three-bodied regulatory structure set up as a check-and-balance system in the very image of the US Constitution–which again, Joseph Smith maintained was inspired by God to establish God’s purposes and Kingdom on Earth.
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Do_Mormons_Believe_in_Blind_Obedience.html
In the organization of a new stake recently, a general authority rolled into town to conduct the various meetings and sustain new stake authorities. This authority came to the business of installing the new stake president and put him before the body to be sustained. “Those who can sustain (so-and-so) in this calling, please manifest by the uplifted hand…. And then he said, “Those opposed…as if it would make any difference….” concluding with a drifting-off tone, a wink, and a responsive chuckle from the crowd.
Plainly, this general authority was under the impression that the rubber-stamping process should be enforced all the way down to you and me out there in the pews on Sunday. If I had raised my hand and objected to the sustaining of a man who’d been molesting my toddlers, would that make a difference do you suppose? What if he were looking to sustain a vote on something really really controversial, something that changed doctrine and the church itself? How about plural marriage for instance?
Official Declaration—1
To Whom It May Concern:
…Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.
There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.
Wilford Woodruff
President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6, 1890.
Now, you might expect me to use plural marriage as an example of prophetic waffling or doctrinal unclarity. Nothing could be more untrue. The above declaration simply falls back to previous, superseding doctrines about honoring, sustaining and obeying the law, long found directly from Joseph Smith and published in the Wentworth Letter, now called the Articles of Faith.
12 We believe in being asubject to bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the dlaw.
The truth is, laws were passed that were specifically designed to kill Mormonism. These authorized civil authority to confiscate the entire bank account of the LDS church and every stick of property it owned for teaching that plural marriage was a correct Biblical principle. The accusation president Woodruff was fending off was that Mormons may 
have stopped teaching plural marriage as a proper Biblical marital status, but everyone knew the church still believed it and so all of Mormonism was still guilty. In the end, Mormonism’s Christian persecutors made a lot of headway into making that “thought-crime” stick anyway, Constitutional or not. However, as long as plural marriage was neither taught nor authorized by the LDS church, the church was legally off the hook. So, the above “Manifesto” was published and the policy was sustained as canon doctrine and thereby Mormons were officially out of the multiple wife business. In reality, all it really does is re-assert the LDS respect and deference for the Constitution of the United States of America, which on this uniquely Mormon marital issue, had been manipulated by a lot of activist Christian judges and attorneys who’s real interest was destroying the church, not regulating marriage.
What I’m most fascinated by however, is this rather casual aside to the whole controversy:
The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty. (Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff Regarding the Manifesto: Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.)
The emphasis is mine above. This is the most self-serving, logically circular, and mindlessly, NAZI-propaganda-like verse in all of the LDS scriptures. This is papal infallibility added to the king’s divine right to
rule added to the deity of pharaoh as implemented today. In reality, it’s merely a quick aside by way of introducing the gravity of Woodruff’s announcement about abandoning plural marriage. He’s merely reassuring that he’s not a fallen prophet for retreating from the practice. This little reassurance however, is now a bigger statement of “Mormon doctrine” than the plural marriage Manifesto it prefaces. It is used by any general authority in the church, and particularly the president, to halt any debate on any subject he’s decided to booster. The literal belief of those promoting it, is that since the guy they’re backing is still moving their lips and words are coming out, it must be God’s direct will, because if it wasn’t, God would have struck them dead on the spot before He’d allow any of them to babble out anything goofy or misleading.
Anyone who’s read half of what Brigham Young babbled about knows this surely cannot be true. Ask Bruce McConkie. For some reason Bruce and I have become rather sympatico in my old age on this score. But on the other hand, Brigham Young also said this:
“The greatest fear I have is that the people of this Church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord.” 21
http://www.staylds.com/docs/WhatIsOfficialMormonDoctrine.html
President Woodruff had no intention of making a claim of LDS infallibility where the president of the church is concerned when he assured his audience that the Lord would not let the LDS leadership lead its flock astray. That wasn’t even his point. All he was trying to do was brace them for a major reversal in what had become a major doctrine of salvation for the Saints in Utah.
But isn’t there indeed a system set up that would in fact check any church president before he went very far astray? Isn’t that called “church government?” Isn’t that called being governed “by common consent,” rather than being obligatorily extorted by the powerful to rubber-stamp their decrees? Or Is God’s whole plan to guard His people from human error, ignorance and prejudice, just to shoot a lightning bolt through the prophet if he misspeaks?
And isn’t it through church government, not a direct call from God, that the church president gets to be church president in the first place? It’s all done by seniority of call, not a voting process. Originally succession went to the oldest apostle, later changed to the senior apostle by time of service in the calling. Automatic succession by seniority eliminates a lot of politics, but has its disadvantages as well and tends to create a geriarchy led by the least current old codger who’s the least connected with what’s going on now in the world. And it leaves lingering, fluttering death-strings of those who have strong doctrinal views on one side of an argument, who die after a few years or even months of harping on it as a new president, only to be replaced by another octogenarian on his death bed who has an entirely opposite viewpoint. But you see, I’m wrong for even seeing what is patently obvious and saying a word about it to anyone according to Dallin Oaks or Bruce R McConkie. The proper duty of the rank-and-file Mormon is to quietly pray your heart out hoping God will eventually take care of it directly or the Brethren with eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses.
I could be even wronger by pointing out that Acts 1:15-26 clearly explains how the original apostles, let by Peter, selected a member of their body, and that it involved a pre-selection and the casting of lots—nothing like the procedure used in Mormonism today. And Brigham Young governed without a presidency for many years before he dared call himself “president” of the church and take Joseph Smith’s place directly—for fear of congregational dissent. So Mormon claims of having the same organization as the “primitive” Church is a little grandiose. To make the point clearer, Jesus personally appeared and called his apostles. What happens now doesn’t even involve casting lots to introduce a Divinely random input to the selection. For generations Utahns were calling Utahns from around the Valley and the system just shuffled them down the seniority line and that’s how we got who we got in there now, period. In order to sell the notion that Jesus personally called today’s “Prophet,” you have to assume Jesus “prompted” his name to stand out on a list of local candidates on some ward roster forty or fifty years ago, and through Divine Providence, rising here and there to this and that call, the fact that he ended up at the top of the hierarchy was subtly guided all that time through all those processes, and most of all you have to believe that God predestined him to be born along the Wasatch Front to just the right Mormon family. All of this bolsters the contention that the closed and ignorant society of Utah is Zion and God’s repository of all wisdom and spirituality. Why else would all the “Prophets” come from Utah? Well, because the selection process has essentially excluded anyone out of earshot of the Salt Lake temple from even getting on a list. The concept of God appearing at the deathbed of the outgoing “Prophet” and speaking the name and GPS coordinates of His Chosen successor isn’t in the system.
Which leads me to a load of constantly changing doctrines and policies, or even canon verse, like the repeated changing of temple ceremonial texts which are the highest of the LDS canon, the rules for conducting the quorums of the LDS leadership, even the questions on the temple recommend list and how they got there, that just somehow, somewhere get “decided” and continue forever until one day they change it all, and basically you’re just supposed to deem it none of your business. Annoying, yes, goes directly to the topic of Mormon doctrine, but for me and most other Mormons, not terribly troubling because these are doctrinal components not meant for public consumption anyway.
What is however openly troubling for many Latter-day Saints is the Mormon “no contention” doctrine. This very popular dogma has been magnifying itself for generations and is now cited any time you disagree with anyone of any authority in the church. The first person to stop the argument and say in the sweetest primary voice, “I feel the spirit of contention,” wins their point, and disrespects the other party into silence. This phenomenon arises out one silly verse in 3d Nephi that Mormonism has taken to the hysterically extreme:
29 For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit ofacontention is not of me, but is of the bdevil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.
Dallin Oaks is famous for his role in very publicly taking this blind obedience principle to new heights in the first major network television documentary about the modern LDS church under president Gordon B Hinckley. In this video Oaks gives a little lecture against criticizing LDS church leadership, in which he says without a trace of sarcasm or so much as a wink to the irony of it:
It’s wrong to criticise leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcwghb_don-t-ever-criticize-us-even-if-th_new’
Oak’s suggestion arises from the very real LDS expectation that as its leadership is speaking away incorrectly, or heading the church down the wrong path, God will send an angel to “reveal” their error, or that God will actually strike the offen
ding idiot dead before any damage can be done. Therefore, no rank-and-file Mormon need ever speak out. Just patiently wait for the “Brethren” to either correct themselves or be corrected by Deity. Have faith and wait–however long it takes for them to realize what is blatantly obvious to you and the world. And again, this inane contention arises from Wilford Woodruff’s urgent appeal to his flock to not fire him or leave the church in mass exodus because he was putting the kibosh on plural marriage.
The dilemma I have here is that the claims of Mormon leadership’s infallibility, combined with the congregation’s duty to ignore their error even when they are obviously being fallible, is clearly Mormon doctrine. There are verses in canon scripture. Everyone believes it literally. These notions are standard citations by leadership to prove that leadership is never wrong. And yes, numerous other scriptures refute the notion of LDS leadership infallibility, but are not nearly as faith-instilling and spiritually sexy. To a church leader, statements from scripture that suggest infallibility are like spiritual crack. It’s a shortcut to a spiritual high, or at least obedience. Scripture that concedes LDS leadership to be mere mortals and thus fallible, are only cited on rare occasions to explain away doctrinal paradoxes and changes over the years.
Papal infallibility is a cheap and easy doctrinal win. It sticks to any argument you want to win as a massive force-multiplier, even if you only have a shred of implied authority behind you. It is obviously not likely to be abandoned by anyone in authority. The only way to combat contemporary human authority, is to fire back a contradictory verse of canon. So just like any Biblical scripture, just like any other religious denomination, Mormons a lot of the time just end up bashing even the modern canon verses back and forth, proving to themselves whatever they want to believe anyway. And in perfect circular argument, Papal infallibility allows you to dismiss any canonical argument against you by contending that the Pope is not only infallible, but the only mortal authority capable of properly defining not just doctrine, but the Divine canon itself, and by extension how canon is to be applied and interpreted.
Joseph Smith almost daily, hammered straight and true at specific questions and nailed the answers to the canon wall. What virtually every Mormon “prophet” since Smith has done instead, is occasionally extrapolate from either Smith’s revelations and statements of faith, or tangential statements by Smith other prophets. For example, President Woodruff clearly didn’t mean his little preface to become what it has now become. He had intended a simple reassurance that in the specific case of his cessation of plural marriage, that he had seen a revelation outlining its necessity. He makes this abundantly clear. He makes it abundantly clear that all he is promising is that in the matter at hand, he is not a fallen prophet. Likewise, Nephi’s warning against contention never intended to stifle earnest and enthusiastic debate.
http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/tagm30.html
Apparently modern Mormon leaders find attempting to nail down Mormon doctrine point-by-point in specific terms so trepedatious that they don’t actually do it unless, and until literally slapped repeatedly about the head and chest with it. When it won’t go away, when it will result in death and destruction and the end of the church, when riots might ensue at any moment, when the entire progress of the Kingdom of God on Earth is at stake, only then will they actually sit down and deal with the given issue—and then only that issue. I could suppose that this seems to be because they are skittish of late about pulling a meeting on some critical doctrinal crises because it implies, nay almost demands that somebody in charge of the meeting pony-up a revelation, or they all look impotent, ineffectual, and a bit silly arguing amongst themselves just like commoners.
In the case of plural marriage, Joseph Smith received a revelation sustaining the practice of plural marriage as observed by ancient prophets. (Section 132 D&C.) The modern Saints began to practice it. That led to serious social and political problems that would have destroyed the church. Wilford Woodruff went to the Lord, then the body of the church, laid out all the doctrinal considerations, asserted that God had told him to issue a 
decree that the practice should be stopped, and made a completely consistent and rational account of both himself and God’s will in the matter.
http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132.34-40,45?lang=eng#33
No complaints have I then, with Wilford Woodruff or the whole plural marriage issue. The system worked. That’s actually how serious LDS doctrinal points should be dealt with. But you must also see, that in the course of solving one doctrinal dilemma, Wilford Woodruff’s allusion to LDS presidential infallibility just created another huge doctrinal controversy. As a practical policy, all LDS general authorities are now treated by themselves and their membership as if they were infallible. If not infallible perhaps, then certainly unquestionable. In effect, infallible by other means.
As it happens, the local priesthood lesson this coming week is a little tome by Ezra Taft Benson, out of the June 1980 Liahona, titled, Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet. It’s a classic, self-serving primer in LDS hierarchal terrorism:
1. The prophet is the only man who speaks for the Lord in everything.
2. The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works.
3. The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet.
4. The prophet will never lead the church astray.
5. The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time.
6. The prophet does not have to say “Thus Saith the Lord,” to give us scripture.
7. The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.
8. The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning.
9. The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual.
10. The prophet may advise on civic matters.
11. The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich.
12. The prophet will not necessarily be popular with the world or the worldly.
13. The prophet and his counselors make up the First Presidency—the highest quorum in the Church.
14. The prophet and the presidency—the living prophet and the First Presidency—follow them and be blessed—reject them and suffer.
It would take gigabytes to tear into the fascinatingly backwards little sermons that Benson delivers to explain each of these points, but for present purposes I will simply remark that this lesson appeared thirty-one years ago as of this writing as a First Presidency message and it preceded Bruce McConkie’s famous rebuke of Eugene England, in which McConkie vehemently contradicts most of Benson’s points above. McConkie could not have been unaware of it and perhaps it’s a bit of a play from the top to slap down both sides of the then raging battle over just who decided what Mormon doctrine was. This war was fought on the one side by BYU religion professors and other civilian dabblers like Skousen, and on the other hand, was waged on the offensive by a somewhat two-fronted attack first from Bruce R McConkie, who used the opportunity to declare himself the prime arbiter of all things doctrinal, and finally, not entirely in lockstep with McConkie, a late-entering bombing run of official declarations from “The Brethren” trying to own the debate and keep McConkie in his place. By Benson’s criteria this list of “truths” is “modern scripture” and “more vital to us than the standard works,” and essentially superior to Mormon canon. Benson had the credentials and wrote as President of the Quorum of Twelve, on assignment of the First Presidency, delivered it in official LDS forum, and published it in official LDS magazines. Either Benson and his Quorum of Twelve and First Presidency are preaching false doctrine here, and leading the whole church astray, or Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.
Another way to phrase this convoluted argument is to say that Mormons in the little Utah Valley after many generations of isolation had finally got smart. They made a university. Then they found out that if you get smart and encourage study and analysis and free-thinking, you end up with a lot of Mormons with high degrees asking questions that “The Brethren” can’t answer or can’t answer without calling their predecessors ignorant and uninspired at least by implication. You are now stuck, because the “Glory of God is Intelligence,” but intelligent Mormons spot problems and inconsistencies and outright incorrectness. They find these things in Mormon leadership, their writings, and their theories, past and present. McConkie’s solution was to claim it’s all about the canon. The ultimate standard of correct Mormon doctrine is tested with the canon, and no matter who said it at what level of authority in the LDS church, if it disagrees with the canon, the error is with the man and the doctrine, never the canon. The Brethren responded by boasting that God has thus far only called the divinely inspired ignorant and unpopular to serve as prophets, went on to categorize the intelligent and educated as inherently rebellious and ripe for hell, and threw in the rich just to cover all bases since the rich tend to be better educated anyway. And most importantly, The Brethren also pointed out to lesser authorities like Bruce McConkie that it is the First Presidency and only the First Presidency that has anything to say about anything doctrinal.
This of course, did little to shut Bruce McConkie up, or dissuade his by then massive fan base amongst the LDS general membership, or even give them cause for tempering their absolutely desperate loyalty to his officially condemned encyclopedia of Mormon Doctrine.
Officially, Bruce McConkie’s warning to Eugene England that canon scripture, including modern canon revelations, are the foundation of Mormon “Gospel,” is false.
According to Benson’s sermon delivered at England’s very place of employment, BYU, only months previous to England’s berating by McConkie, canon scripture is not in point of fact the measuring stick by which we establish the truth of Mormon doctrine. Not according to the “Prophet.” Officially, the “Prophet” says that Mormon doctrine is whatever the present “Prophet” says it is. And it doesn’t have to be a “revelation” and it doesn’t have to be informed, educated, or inspired. It could be on any subject including civic or political matters. Officially, the “Prophet’s” every random opinion is “more vital” than canon scripture. That’s not me being sarcastic. That’s exactly the way it is repeatedly spelled out in official teaching materials. That is the way it is universally understood in the church.
Officially, when a new “Prophet” assumes the title of LDS President, Mormon doctrine becomes whatever he changes it to. A living “Prophet” trumps the entire history of dead prophets and everything they passed on, including thousands of years of canon scripture.
That’s what the “Prophet” teaches.
But then, what would you expect the “Prophet’s” take on the issue to be? Would you expect him to say, don’t listen to me all that closely—I’m just wingin’ it like you with the scriptures and doin’ my best to make sense of it all…? Of course the prophet’s going to tell you to follow himself. Of course he’s going to promise you the Lord would never let him fail you.
I’d love to be able to explain this in a more credible, sensible, even logical fashion, particularly for the sake of some wavering Saint or LDS investigator who finds this irrational line of dogma intellectually retarded and spiritually troubling. This is all the better I can do.
LDS prophets and leaders are by their own definition, infallibly fallible. The effective doctrine on LDS leadership fallibility is that they are indeed fallible, but you’re not allowed to call them on it.
Mormon Doctrine Part 2: The “R” is for “Rant”
The convoluted process for determining Mormon doctrine on this or that score today, is nowhere near as
simple and direct as showing up at Newell Whitney’s store, buying a plug of chaw, a quart of whiskey, and going upstairs to the School of Prophets to ask Joseph Smith. Indeed, the “process” of determining Mormon doctrine currently isn’t even a “process.” It just sort of happens. “Mormon” doctrine mutates daily and continues to just slop out of the pulpits and quorums and other organizations in the church, extrapolated from raw journals and personal, pet writings of Mormon authorities over the years.
A good example of some of these sorts of apocryphal sources is the a decades-after-the-fact interview with Zebedee Coltrin about his attendance in the previously mentioned School of the Prophets that originally met above Whtiney’s store. And while helpful on one level, Zebedee could pretty much say anything he wanted to about what was taught or performed there and assign any doctrine or practice to anyone he felt like. But whether coming from Zebedee Coltrin or Brigham Young, this is the sort of informational source the LDS church has relied upon for its “doctrine” since Joseph Smith was assassinated. And it’s not a good thing.
http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/ZebC.html
Don’t take my word for it. Bruce R “McConcrete,” the late apostle who wrote in stone, will make the case for me:
The following is a letter written by LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie and sent to a BYU Professor by the name of Eugene England. The purpose of McConkie’s letter was to let Dr. England know that he was very displeased with certain ideas he was espousing publicly. These included teachings taught in the past by leaders such as Brigham Young….
The letter itself is quite lengthy so I have condensed it. It deals with a number of LDS “doctrines” and doctrinal camps that Brother England was attempting to reconcile through the examination of the historical teachings primarily of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. The “King Follet Discourse,” is one of Joseph Smith’s most popular apocryphal writings, and is at the center of England’s postulations:
THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
The Council of Twelve
47 East South Temple Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84150
February 19, 1981Mr. Eugene England
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxxxDear Brother England:
This may well be the most important letter you have or will receive. It is written in reply to an undated letter from you which came in an envelope postmarked, September 4, 1980. Your letter enclosed a 19-page document which you had prepared under the title, “The Perfection and Progression of God: Two Spheres of Existence and Two Modes of Discourse.”
In your letter and the article enclosed with it, you set forth the thesis that although God knows all things as pertaining to our sphere of existence, there are nonetheless other spheres beyond ours in which Deity continues to advance and progress in knowledge and truth. In espousing and explaining this philosophy you suppose you are harmonizing quotations from various of the early Brethren. Some of these statements emphatically say that God knows all things and has all power and others of them say that he is advancing in knowledge and understanding and is gaining new truths.
…
On Sunday, June 1, 1980, I spoke at one of the multi-stake firesides in the Marriott Center on the subject, “The Seven Deadly Heresies.” In that talk I said:
“There are those who say that God is progressing in knowledge and is learning new truths.
“This is false — utterly, totally, and completely. There is not one sliver of truth in it. It grows out of a wholly twisted and incorrect view of the King Follet Sermon and of what is meant by eternal progression.
…
“Eternal progression consists of living the kind of life God lives and of increasing in kingdoms and dominions everlastingly. Why anyone should suppose that an infinite and eternal being, who has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years, who made the sidereal heavens, whose creations are more numerous than the particles of the earth, and who is aware of the fall of every sparrow — why anyone would suppose that such a being has more to learn and new truths to discover in the laboratories of eternity is totally beyond my comprehension.
…
He [Brigham Young] was guided by the Holy Spirit in his teachings in general. He was a mighty prophet. He led Israel the way the Lord wanted his people led. He built on the foundation laid by the Prophet Joseph. He completed his work and has come on to eternal exaltation.
Nonetheless, as Joseph Smith so pointedly taught, a prophet is not always a prophet, only when he is acting as such. Prophets are men and they make mistakes. Sometimes they err in doctrine. This is one of the reasons the Lord has given us the Standard Works. They become the standards and rules that govern where doctrine and philosophy are concerned. If this were not so, we would believe one thing when one man was president of the Church and another thing in the days of his successors. Truth is eternal and does not vary. Sometimes even wise and good men fall short in the accurate presentation of what is truth. Sometimes a prophet gives personal views which are not endorsed and approved by the Lord.
Yes, President Young did teach that Adam was the father of our spirits, and all the related things that the cultists ascribe to him. This, however, is not true. He expressed views that are out of harmony with the gospel. But, be it known, Brigham Young also taught accurately and correctly, the status and position of Adam in the eternal scheme of things. What I am saying is that Brigham Young, contradicted Brigham Young, and the issue becomes one of which Brigham Young we will believe. The answer is we will believe the expressions that accord with the teachings in the Standard Works.
Yes, Brigham Young did say some things about God progressing in knowledge and understanding, but again, be it known, that Brigham Young taught, emphatically and plainly, that God knows all things and has all power meaning in the infinite, eternal and ultimate and absolute sense of the word. Again, the issue is, which Brigham Young shall we believe and the answer is: We will take the one whose statements accord with what God has revealed in the Standard Works.
I think you can give me credit for having a knowledge of the quotations from Brigham Young relative to Adam, and of knowing what he taught under the subject that has become known as the Adam God Theory. President Joseph Fielding Smith said that Brigham Young will have to make his own explanations on the points there involved. I think you can also give me credit for knowing what Brigham Young said about God progressing. And again, that is something he will have to account for. As for me and my house, we will have the good sense to choose between the divergent teachings of the same man and come up with those that accord with what God has set forth in his eternal plan of salvation.
This puts me in mind of Paul’s statement: “There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” (1 Cor. 11:19.) I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality. We will be judged by what we believe among other things. If we believe false doctrine, we will be condemned. If that belief is on basic and fundamental things, it will lead us astray and we will lose our souls. This is why Nephi said: “And all those who preach false doctrines, . . . wo, wo, wo be unto them, saith the Lord God Almighty, for they shall be thrust down to hell!: (2 Ne. 28:15.) This clearly means that people who teach false doctrine in the fundamental and basic things will lose their souls. The nature and kind of being that God is, is one of these fundamentals. I repeat: Brigham Young erred in some of his statements on the nature and kind of being that God is and as to the position of Adam in the plan of salvation, but Brigham Young also taught the truth in these fields on other occasions. And I repeat, that in his instance, he was a great prophet and has gone on to eternal reward. What he did is not a pattern for any of us. If we choose to believe and teach the false portions of his doctrines, we are making an election that will damn us.
It should be perfectly evident that under our system of church discipline, it would be anticipated that some others besides Brigham Young would pick up some of his statements and echo them. Those who did this, also on other occasions, taught accurately and properly what the true doctrines of the gospel are. I do not get concerned when a good and sound person who. On the over-all, is teaching the truth happens to err on a particular point and say something in conflict with what he has said himself on a previous occasion. We are all mortal. We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. No single individual all the time is in tune with the Holy Spirit, but I do get concerned when some person or group picks out false statements and makes them the basis of their presentation and theology and thus ends up having a false concept of the doctrine, which in reality, was not in the mind of the person whose quotations they are using.
Wise gospel students do not build their philosophies of life on quotations of individuals, even though those quotations come from presidents of the Church. Wise people anchor their doctrine on the Standard Works. When Section 20 says that God is infinite and eternal, it means just that and so on through all of the revelations. There is no need to attempt to harmonize conflicting views when some of the views are out of harmony with the Standard Works. This is what life is all about. The Lord is finding out what we will believe in spite of the allurements of the world or the philosophies of men or the seemingly rational and logical explanations that astute people make.
We do not solve our problems by getting a statement from the president of the Church or from someone else on a subject. We have been introduced to the gospel; we have the gift of the Holy Ghost; we have the Standards Works and it is our responsibility to get in tune and understand properly what the Lord has revealed and has had us canonize. The end result of this course of personally and individually pursuing light and truth is to reach that millennial state of which the scriptures say it will no longer be necessary for every man to say to his neighbor “know the Lord,” for all shall know him from the greatest to the least. Joseph Smith says this will be by the spirit of revelation.
…It is not in your province to set in order the Church or to determine what is doctrines shall be. It is axiomatic among us to know that God has given apostles and prophets “for the edifying of the body of Christ,” and that their ministry is to see that “we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Eph. 4:11-16.) This means, among other things, that it is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent. You do not have a divine commission to correct me or any of the Brethren. The Lord does not operate that way. If I lead the Church astray, that is my responsibility, but the fact still remains that I am the one appointed with all the rest involved so to do. The appointment is not given to the faculty at Brigham Young University or to any of the members of the Church. The Lord’s house is a house of order and those who hold the keys are appointed to proclaim the doctrines.
Now you know that this does not mean that individuals should not do research and make discoveries and write articles. What it does mean is that what they write should be faith promoting and where doctrines are concerned, should be in harmony with that which comes from the head of the Church. And those at the head of the Church have the obligation to teach that which is in harmony with the Standard Works. If they err then be silent on the point and leave the event in the hands of the Lord. Some day all of us will stand before the judgment bar and be accountable for our teachings. And where there have been disagreements the Lord will judge between us. In the meantime if we want to save our own souls we need to strive with all the power we have to be in harmony with the revelations and not to be teaching or promulgating doctrines that suit our fancy.
I advise you to take my counsel on the matters here involved. If I err, that is my problem; but in your case if you single out some of these things and make them the center of your philosophy, and end up being wrong, you will lose your soul. One of the side effects of preaching contrary to what the Brethren preach is to get a spirit of rebellion growing up in your heart. This sort of thing cankers the soul spiritually. It drives people out of the Church. It weakens their faith. All of us need all of the faith and strength and spiritual stability we can get to maintain our positions in the Church and to work out our salvation.
Now, I think I have said enough in this letter so that if you are receptive and pliable, you will get the message. If you are not, rebellion will well up in your heart. I pray for your well-being. I repeat: the door to my office is open. Perhaps I should tell you what one of the very astute and alert General Authorities said to me when I chanced to mention to him the subject of your letter to me. He said: “Oh dear, haven’t we rescued him enough times already.”
Now I hope you will ponder and pray and come to a basic understanding of fundamental things and that unless and until you can on all points, you will remain silent on those where differences exist between you and the Brethren. This is the course of safety. I advise you to pursue it. If you do not, perils lie ahead. It is not too often in this day that any of us are told plainly and bluntly what ought to be. I am taking the liberty of so speaking to you at this time, and become thus a witness against you if you do not take the counsel.
I repeat: I have every good wish for you, pray that the Lord will bless you and hope that things will work out properly and well in your life.
Sincerely,
Bruce R. McConkie
BRM:vh
P.S. I am taking the liberty of sending copies of this response to those to whom you sent your communication.
It turns out Bruce R
McConkie is more cynical than I have ever been. And I grew up believing him to be the most obnoxiously pious of the pious. The most nose-rubbingly enlightened of the enlightened. I will also tell you that Brother McConkie was so enthusiastic about his unique calling in this matter that he mailed out so many copies that they instantly became common currency in anti-Mormon camps. What actually came of this screed is nothing but fodder for anti-Mormonism. In terms of its doctrinal merits, It vanished into a very quiet oblivion. It went to the same theological wastebasket that his Seven Deadly Heresies talk went to—except of course this too became great fodder for the anti-Mormon efforts around the globe, because in that little jewel of a discourse, he said things like, having a personal relationship with Christ is heretical. You’d think the “greatest theologian of our times” would have the discernment to see how raving, anti-Christian sound-bites could be used against us, wouldn’t you?
Then again, McConkie has also been on the other end of the theological power structure. Bruce R knows well how it feels on the other side of the lecture about following what the Brethren want taught:
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
47 E. South Temple Street
Salt Lake City, UtahDavid O. McKay, President
February 3, 1959Dr. A. Kent Christensen
Department of Anatomy
Cornell University Medical College
1300 York Avenue
New York 21, New YorkDear Brother Christensen:
I have your letter of January 23, 1959 in which you ask for a statement of the Church’s position on the subject of evolution.
The Church has issued not official statement on the subject of the theory of evolution.
Neither ‘Man, His Origin and Destiny’ by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, nor ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie, is an official publication of the Church. . . .[Emphasis added]
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
In the context of his own censure and the Brethren’s repeated disavowment of his most popular book, McConkie’s letter to England is truly an amazing document. Imagine the sheer ego it would take to just casually quote yourself from a talk you gave recently rather than type out a new paragraph like a mere mortal having a normal conversation. But that’s the psychological profile of an academic. If it’s published, it’s authoritative. Even if you’re publishing yourself it’s still authoritative.
Here also, is Bruce R McConkie as the pot calling the kettle black. He says to teach what the “Brethren” teach. That takes a lot of hutzpah from a guy who’s own seminal work, Mormon Doctrine, got him spanked and spanked hard by the “Brethren” for publishing unauthorized and offensive doctrinal errors from cover to cover. Then he has the gall to say Brigham Young taught false doctrine. Worse than that, to paraphrase David O McKay, McConkie’s whole tone and demeanor in Mormon Doctrine seemed deliberately designed to tell the entire orthodox Christian world to feck off. Frankly, that message still comes through loud and clear even after Brethren-enforced “corrections.”
Oddly enough, Brigham Young, who McConkie found guilty of teaching doctrine not approved by the “Brethren,” was the first “Brethren.” Brother Brigham is why we now just call them “The Brethren.” McConkie however, is the guy who made “The Brethren” sound like a mafia hit squad, who’d be talking to you later if you didn’t take his advice right now.
Apparently a live Bruce trumps a dead Brigham. And yes Bruce, if you’re reading along up there, the LDS church has in fact believed one thing under one president, and another thing under another president. Ironically, you yourself point out that Brigham Young taught that Adam was God as president of the church, and then say this is damnably false doctrine according to you and then current leadership.
David O McKay, another case in point, firmly stated that there was no doctrine at all demanding that negroes be denied the priesthood, that it was a policy matter that could be reversed. He even led a council of the combined quorums in 1969, and achieved an affirmative vote to do so, until Harold B Lee, out of town on business, came back and made such a stink that they had a losing re-vote, based upon his insistence that it was a canon doctrine matter that would require a revelation to change. Joseph Fielding Smith then succeeded McKay as president and further imposed this negro-anti-priesthood doctrine upon the church. Others, like McConkie, went on writing books and essays explaining in great detail the logic and reason of how negroes would never receive the priesthood in this lifetime. Smith died in 1972 and Harold B Lee sat in for a year succeeding Smith. He even more emphatically bolstered enforcement of the doctrine of the negro being denied priesthood authority, claiming it would not happen until some distant future eternity. Then he died in 1973, and under Spencer W Kimball a few years later, that promised, priesthood-bearing eternity arrived upon the Mormon negro rather suddenly. So suddenly, that McConkie had no defense for his vehement Mormon Doctrine commentaries paraphrasing Fielding Smith’s theology about it other than “I was wrong.”
The point is Bruce, you were merely parroting your father-in-law, a president of the church, and he was wrong. So was Harold B Lee, also a president of the church. So was Brigham Young on the matter. So was John Taylor, his successor, and I could name many more LDS presidents and “Prophets” who were wrong on the matter as it turns out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
McConkie says Brigham Young contradicted Brigham Young. Then he says a prophet is not always a prophet. He then quotes Joseph Smith debunking himself and half of what he ever said or wrote by implication. Then McConkie says (and even I shudder at this) that God allows even Brigham Young to teach false doctrine. God allows false doctrine to be taught in the church—even if from its president and Prophet.
See, good ol’ Bruce couldn’t just correct Gene England and let it lie. And McConkie doesn’t even think to question the reliability of the records which supply us with these crazy Brigham Young “doctrines,” the most obvious weak link. And then he really crosses the line into full hypocrisy: He doesn’t claim the “Brethren” to be infallible, just omnipotent.
If Brigham Young leads me to hell, argues McConkie, well, I guess I’m in hell but Brigham gets off because he’s a great prophet and did all those other good things that insures his reward anyway. I also presume that if Bruce R McConkie leads me to hell, I’m again the one stuck in hell, not The Conk. McConkie say it’s on his head for teaching me the false doctrine that sent me there, but what I guess that really means is that old Bruce will feel really bad about my plight as I eternally splash in the Lake of Fire, while he’s up there writing pompous letters on his Celestial letterhead to underlings in the lower Kingdoms of Glory.
The solution Bruce McConkie demands of you, is that you should not explore Brigham Young’s teachings, a man who saved the religion and was hand-picked by Joseph Smith to take over, but rather you should embrace the superior teaching and enlightenment of Bruce Redd McConkie instead. McConkie doesn’t make any promises though. He admits he might not be right either, but compared to Brigham Young, the odds of correctness improve greatly, he clearly implies. Still not much comfort in that Bruce.
Now, I called Bruce R McConkie a hypocrite back there a bit. I mean that in a very classical sense. McConkie in this letter to England, did just what he faulted Brigham Young for doing back in the day. He pulled a great big handful of doctrinal turds out of his arse just to make a point and win an argument. He used this arsenal of stinky theology just to fling poo at England for effect, acting like the King Monkey of the primate house at the zoo. McConkie was intellectually crafting talking points, not, divining rounded statements of universal truth.
And you see, when you check this little McConkie rant against Mormon canon as he suggests, he only condemns himself. Wilford Woodruff I think would disagree with the notion that God allows false doctrine to be taught by the LDS president. Woodruff seemed to think it wasn’t in the Lord’s mind, not in the Lord’s program to let the “Brethren” lead the church astray with false doctrine. And that’s canon. Bruce.
http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/1?lang=eng
Yes, the Twelve or other general authorities serve as a representative body who are authorized to call out the “Brethren” on false doctrine—whoever that “Brother” might be. That’s not necessarily all that mystical. Church government is inspired by God to do this job. The problem is, until recently it hasn’t been doing the job at all, it’s been doing the same schizophrenic waffling McConkie is doing, running for dogmatic cover between urging the faithful to continue lapping up every silly babble from the mouth of the current “Prophet,” telling the rank and file to shut up 
about any confusion or doctrinal uncertainty, while at the same time claiming the liberty to fight amongst themselves over just who’s twist on what doctrine is going to be binding for this next generation or so—but behind closed doors and very quietly.
Keep in mind now, that McConkie was not assigned to write this letter. It is sent on Council of Twelve letterhead and he makes an anonymous allusion to some other “general authority” he suggests he had discussed the matter with, but there is no official assignment here to do or say anything from the “Brethren.” And as McConkie points out himself, no single apostle has any inherent authority to define doctrine at all. Witness for Christ, yes, preach doctrine as defined by the First Presidency, yes, but apart from some special assignment not even the apostles are authorized to preach or doctrinally define anything they want. That would be Protestantism.
That Mormon apostles and general authorities have felt they are freely entitled to explore, ad-lib, publish, and promulgate their own doctrinal, literary and presentational works over the ages without permission, editorial input, or approval from the First Presidency is the problem. Bruce McConkie makes this clear in his letter to England, yet McConkie had this problem pointedly spelled out for him by the Brethren with his own first doctrinal effort, Mormon Doctrine, and McConkie pressed ahead anyway in direct defiance of the wishes of then president David O McKay. So, as I say, McConkie is a hypocrite of the first order in this matter.
The key to understanding Bruce R McConkie, is to know that he is merely the sum of all he’s read. He’s a consumer and regurgitator theologically, not a producer and refiner. Bruce R McConkie’s sole source of theological insight and authority was his ability to recall and vehemently quote a lot of things written by a lot of actual authorities scattered around in a lot of places. Naturally, he centers onto the canon, the standard Works. No problem there, except that he neglects to see that a huge chunk of these were delivered by Joseph Smith in modern times. I guess we’ll “prove” Joseph Smith’s uncanonized teachings by checking them against his canonical teachings. That’s the same way Bruce R footnotes Bruce R to prove Bruce R is correct.
McConkie’s main thesis is entirely sound. Essentially, the difference between Joseph Smith or Brigham Young telling fireside stories and Joseph Smith or Brigham Young speaking modern Holy Scripture, is a formal vote of the “Brethren” in the various quorums sanctioning some of his writings as canon, and others as unreliable. Full canonization naturally, would also require the sustaining vote of the general body of the church. But McConkie’s fallacious logic myopically ignores the fact that we use Biblical texts as canon as well. Joseph Smith himself said that these were not entirely reliable. Joseph Smith in fact started rewriting the whole Bible, because Joseph Smith thought the Bible was pretty messed up in some very important places.
God did not give us the Standard Works as McConkie pretends. A collection of “prophets” gave us the canon–every scrap of it. The “canon” we use has been authored, processed, edited, proven and finally sanctioned by the very “Brethren” McConkie claims are “allowed” by God to be flawed and false. They are therefore also freely entitled to falsely canonize their falseness.
Bruce R McConkie really wants to be a foaming fundamentalist. Bruce wants to be able to send you to hell if you don’t sign up. Bruce wants to send you to hell if you don’t swear an oath to the official dogma he’s 
appointed himself to define out of an inerrant canon like a Latter-day Calvin. He just doesn’t quite know how to get there from here so his connective logic is a bit silly.
Mormons do not believe the Bible to be inerrant. What hasn’t been dealt with clearly however, is whether or not any of the modern canon is inerrant. By implication you co go either way with the 
argument. It’s either been recorded by mortal, fallible man and subject to error, or it’s been controlled directly by the guiding hand of God, written, translated, and preserved by a string of Prophets, and therefore exactly the message God intended to deliver.
Likewise, McConkie in one breath declares the “Brethren” to be modern prophets, to be treated for all intents and purposes as inerrant, while in the next breath 
he censures Brigham Young, the second most sanctified Mormon Prophet in history, like he’s some hick preacher who showed up to the tabernacle drunk regularly, took the pulpit with no preparation whatsoever, and commenced to spout off any random old rubbish on his mind at the moment. (Probably too close to the truth there…)
McConkie would just love to play the Grand Inquisitor, but Mormonism isn’t dogmatically precise enough to give him the tools he needs to torture a confession out of you and set you on fire. And the fact is, he never got the job of Big Boss so he could actually authorize himself to do it.
Our poor Bruce in his day, was painfully twisted in his understanding of a number of basic LDS doctrinal concepts. He railed one day in a grand assembly at BYU, against Salvation by Grace Alone, and slapped around yet another BYU religion professor, and author of a book, who had the audacity to promote developing a “personal relationship with Christ.”
On occasion, his honesty caused him to use the bully pulpit to expose teachings—both within as
well as outside the church—with which he did not agree. One issue that caught my attention was his public rebuke of George Pace, an associate professor at BYU. Pace had been advocating that members should strive to have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” a popular theme in evangelical circles but anathema in Mormonism. In March 1982, McConkie gave a devotional address titled “Our Relationship with the Lord” that branded Pace’s book as “unwise” because it contained “plain sectarian nonsense.”
…
On another occasion he publicly condemned the concept of salvation by grace alone, dubbing it the “second greatest heresy” of Christendom. (The idea of God as a spirit won top heretical honors as McConkie called it the“father of all heresies.”) In this speech he recalled an experience he had while driving his car and listening to an“evangelist who was preaching salvation by grace alone.” When this radio evangelist offered his listeners an invitation to be saved simply by believing in Jesus, McConkie commented, “Unfortunately I did not accept his generous invitation to gain instant salvation; and so I suppose my opportunity is lost forever.” The crowd laughed. (“What Think Ye of Salvation by Grace?” BYU devotional address, 10 January 1984).
Mormonism teaches that Jesus is literally and spiritually our big brother. We grew up together. We have the same mother and father. He took human form as we did and lived His life with us. There isn’t a much more
personal relationship than that. That isn’t sectarian nonsense and it isn’t evangelical Christianity. It’s a far more intimate and personal fundamental relationship than anything in “orthodox” Christianity. Bruce McConkie doesn’t know that, which makes him ignorant, not a great theologian.
Likewise, the truth is, fundamental Mormon doctrine states that anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior is “saved” and goes to a reward greater than our imagination can illustrate. Not only that, Joseph Smith taught that you will have a chance to accept Christ here or in the next life and it’s all good. Bruce and his Utah cult of personality, and I mean that this time, have no understanding of the difference between the word “salvation,” and “reward.” The simple fact is that Mormons have always believed in a universal salvation based upon “Grace” alone. The problem is, Utah-product McConkie and his fellow intellectual and theological refugees in the Valley-0, have redefined anything short of the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom as damnation and hell, and anyone not clearly a candidate for the highest reward of the highest heaven, as the damned. If you want to talk about false doctrine and heresy Bruce, there you go. I’ll just say it. Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.
What’s wrong with Mormonism? I asked that question in this series long long ago. The answer is right here: You can’t blame Bruce R McConkie for believing what he did, because his brain struggles for logic and inspiration from the isolated confines of an entirely self-contained Utah Mormon culture. His beliefs arise out of the collective “common sense” of a people self-removed into an environment of cultural inbreeding within a complete shelter from criticism. The Utah Mormon culture has actively promoted for generations, an unnatural lack of intellectual or religious insight or intuition. The Utah church has for generations deliberately eliminated, by the usual estimations, some 2/3 of the human race as candidates for their private, closed, extreme, ultra-pious society, because they do not lower themselves to minister to or associate with those who have not demonstrated a high predisposition toward Celestial Glory—as they self-define these characteristics. Furthermore, the Utah culture has officially incorporated into its church dogma the notion that even Celestial Glory is damnation unless the highest degree of Celestial Glory is achieved, and therefore even the very elect may not be elect enough to be worth wasting any time on.
In short: Bruce McConkie believes that if all you’re doing is keeping souls from the fires of hell and teaching people to live good lives, it’s not worth the church’s time and effort. Bruce R McConkie demands performance. Bruce R McConkie demands statistics and measurable, demonstrable piety and an absolute surrender of every aspect of your life to the “program.” The Mormon “program” will get you to the Celestial Kingdom. Mormons think this attitude is the epitome of wisdom and enlightenment. And so, naturally, in his day, still locked in that dusty Zion gestalt, Bruce McConkie easily found a vast and deep following in Mormonism who’s instinct was to simply defer to his greater intellect and wisdom due to his “calling,” rank, and position in the church.
Indeed, Bruce McConkie, was regarded by most of his era’s Latter-day Saints as a spiritual genius with a direct phone line to God, and was hailed by church president, Joseph Fielding Smith, as, “The greatest theologian of his generation in the church.” This might be expected from Smith, inasmuch as he was McConkie’s father-in-law and McConkie was his theological lackey. Smith was not coincidentally the first major Mormon theological organizer in the Mormon leadership chain, to clean and compile LDS doctrine into a coherent guide to Mormon orthodoxy. In this regard, while McConkie was an excellent scholar and had something of a photographic memory for chapter and verse, all he really did in actual practice was serve as his father-in-law’s chief editor and theological promoter. Most of what Bruce R McConkie wrote comes down to a paraphrase of doctrines promoted by Joseph Fielding Smith.
McConkie’s entire body of work is almost exclusively based on the teachings of his father-in-law. Mormon Doctrine is simply an organized collection of doctrinal issues paraphrased from his father-in-law’s previous efforts such as Fielding Smith’s articles from the Ensign, ultimately published as a series of books called Answers to Gospel Questions. McConkie’s second most famous work, Doctrines of Salvation, is, as I say, merely a direct and credited collection of Fielding Smith’s lectures and essays with McConkie commentary bridging and supporting them. McConkie’s Doctrinal New Testament Commentary is again based primarily upon Fielding Smith’s take on Mormon theology. Where McConkie cites previous Mormon authorities, like Brigham Young or Joseph Smith, these references are again chosen as a reflection of Fielding Smith’s use of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fielding_Smith
Those who think me harsh should consider McConkie’s own confession in his last talk before his death:
“I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.” (Ensign, May 1985, p. 11.)
What McConkie clearly admits here, contrary to the belief of most of his fans, is that at the moment of his death he still had not personally seen Jesus the Christ much less had lengthy interrogatives with Him. McConkie’s “inspiration” clearly came through the very conventional means of a “still, small voice” and the same sorts of highly subjective, highly emotional, extremely personal “impressions” anyone else gets. One could easily concede and admire the semantics of McConkie’s faith-based argument that he could not be more sure about Christ’s Divinity, but this leaves neither he nor his fan base with any particularly deep, detailed, or even “new” insight into Mormon “doctrine.”
Bruce R McConkie tells us nothing you could not have read thousands of years ago from better writers and bigger authorities in Proverbs or Psalms or any of the Gospels. Unlike Brother Bruce, all of these ancient authors actually saw, heard, and were taught directly by Jesus Christ. If you follow Elder McConkie’s strongly worded warning to Brother England, go read them instead of checking out what Mo
rmon Doctrine has to say about it.
McConkie’s works in general are characterized by their authoritative tone. McConkie once wrote to a Mormon scholar in 1980, “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”[10] In his best selling Doctrinal New Testament Commentaries and Messiah series, the sources that are most frequently cited as authority for his interpretational positions are other works authored by himself.[11] He explained, “I would never quote another man unless I could first square what he said with the scriptures and unless he said what was involved better than I could.”[1]
What McConkie’s father-in-law did, as president of the church mind you, was something fundamentally different than what McConkie spent his life doing. Joseph Fielding Smith was academically sifting through the thousands upon thousands of LDS commentaries, journals, conference notations and whatnot, trying to validate what he considered to be “correct” doctrines as he understood them, and debunk “false” doctrines as he found them circulating amongst his flock. He did so from a position in the end, of ultimate church authority, as its “prophet” and president. Before that he worked on assignment by the First Presidency. Joseph Fielding Smith also naturally relied upon his own father’s prophetic disposition in these matters—church president Joseph F Smith. Joseph F Smith was the first church president to seriously scrutinize Mormon folklore and even the previously sacrosanct ramblings of Brigham Young, and take an open stance of “correction” regarding the promulgation of many popular Utah Mormon doctrinal myths like Joseph Smith’s alleged “White Horse Prophecy.”
During his administration as President of the Church, President Smith made significant official statements of Latter-day Saint doctrine:
- “The Origin of Man“: In November 1909, in the midst of public i
nterest in theories of evolution, the First Presidency issued a statement concerning the Latter-Day Saint doctrine. It affirms that God created man in his own image. The document also succinctly reiterates the doctrine of twofold creation (spiritual followed by temporal), the premortal existence of man, and ends noting that man, as a child of God, is capable of evolving into a God.
- “The Father and the Son“: On June 20, 1916, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued a statement examining the LDS use of the term “Father” in scripture, clarifying times when the word referred to God the Father and when the word referred to Jesus Christ. The statement identified four different uses of the word “Father.” God the Father is the literal parent of the spirits of mankind and the earthly father of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is referred to as “the Father” when discussing his role as creator of the earth, when he acts as “the Father” of those who abide in his gospel, and when he acts with the authority of his Heavenly Father while on earth.
- “Vision of the Redemption of the Dead“: On October 3, 1918, Smith received a revelation on the nature of the spirit world and on Jesus Christ’s role in ensuring that the gospel is taught to all men, living and dead. A written account of the revelation was submitted to the general authorities of the church on October 31, 1918 and was unanimously accepted. The revelation was initially published in December 1918, and was added to the Pearl of Great Price, an LDS scripture, in April 1976; it has since been removed from the Pearl of Great Price and added to the Doctrine and Covenants as Section 138. This revelation complemented an 1894 statement on the eternal nature of the family and appropriate work for the dead issued by Wilford Woodruff. Genealogy work by members of the LDS Church increased after both of these statements.
Building on F Smith’s doctrinal bent toward unifying historical and contemporary doctrinal issues, his son, Joseph Fielding Smith, took up the cause of a church-wide debunking, clarification, and correction of LDS “doctrine” and put it to the pen. For years, as apostle and president, he published question and answer sessions in church publications and carried this information over into talks, lectures, books, instructional 
manuals and other published media. He was probably the most prolific and most authoritative LDS theological author of all time. He was certainly one of the most coherent. Like his father before him, he wrote in official LDS volumes published by official LDS institutions, and he spoke from apostolic, prophetic, and presidential authority. His son-in-law, Bruce R McConkie, simply out of self-assertion became the last in this particular generation of LDS doctrinal weeding.
Note again however, that McConkie only ever did body-and-fender work. He never built a car. He never designed so much as a hubcap. He had apostolic title, and occasionally published his opinions in LDS official media. Personally however, he added almost nothing to LDS doctrinal knowledge. His work rather, concerns almost purely the rote parroting of other “prophets” and authorities, to which, he adds primarily his own verification of “correctness.” Bruce R McConkie
McConkie had obviously intended to die leaving us his gift of what he considered to be the definitive work on “Mormon doctrine.” But as we see, in a church based on ongoing revelation, “official”doctrine at best can be rather flexible and dynamically gravitate toward greater and greater enlightenment, and at worst, become so diverse and prolific, that it becomes confused and nebulous.
David O McKay, Harold B Lee and others also attempted to thin out the rural Mormon folklore that had long become intertwined with hard-core LDS doctrine, through the Correlation Movement that began in earnest during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Most of this effort was good obviously. But the central, almost egomaniacal assertion hanging like a pall of stupidity over the entire effort to establish a rational, authoritative Mormon “orthodoxy,” is the contention so often boasted from Joseph Smith’s day to the present, that Mormonism has “restored the fullness of the gospel.” While this braggadocio promises a lot in one sentence, it remains a pretty hollow boast. Mormons can’t in fact even agree upon what “gospel” means nor content themselves that they’ve gotten just as full of it as they can get.
Mormon generation after generation keeps prying and poking around vague, disconnected little mental ramblings of the early church authorities, preserved with varied historical legitimacy as if every member of the church was constantly and desperately trying to reassure themselves that they really are in on the secrets of the universe. And the problem is, the nature of that boast and the culture of Mormonism itself, actually encourages the faithful to read, pray, ponder, and have their own “revelation.” Bruce McConkie’s assertions to Eugene England aside, even sticking to the Standard Works, when millions of people take up their right to personal revelation, sometimes they come up with all sorts of queer ideas. This is just as true of LDS leadership over the ages as it is with the general membership. As McConkie said however, when Brigham Young gets a queer idea here and there, I guess it’s just God’s test to see if we’re spiritually stupid enough to fall for it.
So don’t fall for it.
