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….

http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/King_Follett_Discourse

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, 1981

Mr. Eugene England
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxxx

Dear 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, Utah

David O. McKay, President
February 3, 1959

Dr. A. Kent Christensen
Department of Anatomy
Cornell University Medical College
1300 York Avenue
New York 21, New York

Dear 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]

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon193.htm

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).

http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkie

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 Mormon 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]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_R._McConkie

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 interest 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_F._Smith

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.

Mormon Doctrine Part 1: A Record Keeping People

It’s more revealing than ironic, that the most famous book by the most “authoritative” LDS “authority” for many generations was given the title: Mormon Doctrine, by Bruce R McConkie. The revealing part of course, is that Mormon Doctrine isn’t necessarily Mormon doctrine. It’s merely Bruce R McConkie’s personal take on LDS theological concerns. Some of it is correct and undisputable doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And some of it is not only wrong, it’s been admitted by the author to be embarrassingly wrong. And though Bruce R McConkie has successfully homogenized his Mormon Doctrine theology into LDS dogma because he was responsible for most of the now “canonized” indexing, cross-referencing, commentary and dictionary sections of the LDS “Four Standard Works,” Bruce R McConkie’s original encyclopedia of Mormon “doctrine” remains what it has always been, an almost entirely unauthoritative collection of personal Mormon opinions. Any implied authority it may have had while he was alive died with him in 1985.

http://www.gapages.com/mcconbr1.htm

Mormon Doctrine wasn’t even originally published by the LDS church through its Deseret Book, “official” publishing arm. Mormon Doctrine was published by the period go-to literary marketing wing of rebuffed and rejected LDS apostles, general authorities and literary wannabees, Bookcraft. Bookcraft, or “Priestcraft Book” as I called it before it was bought out by Deseret Book in 1999, eagerly scrounged together odd talks and lectures from whatever LDS “authoritative” source it could scrump out of the religious or intellectual Mormon brain orchards, threw a ghostwriter and an editor at the project, and in a few weeks had yet another inspiring, and more importantly, marketable, piece of LDS er, literature.

The story of how McConkie, not yet an apostle, published this work on his own without any authority or even informing his superiors is an enlightening one. This will come as a shock to most Mormons, particularly of the McConkie era, but Marion G Romney’s evaluation of it at the time, writing on official assignment for the Council of Twelve, under the direction of President David O McKay’s First Presidency, listed over a thousand serious errors and noted the offensive use of negative labels against other religions and an overall pompous and authoritative tone for a book with no approval of the “Brethren” behind it whatsoever:

As to the book itself, notwithstanding its many commendable and valuable features and the author’s assumption of ‘sole and full responsibility’ for it, its nature and scope and the authoritative tone of the style in which it is written pose the question as to the propriety of the author’s attempting such a project without assignment and supervision from him whose right and responsibility it is to speak for the Church on ‘Mormon Doctrine.’ Had the work been authoritatively supervised, some of the following matters might have been omitted and the treatment of others modified.

He then goes into a point-by-point illustration of serious doctrinal errors espoused in the work. President McKay responded with a series of meetings, noted in his diary:

“THURSDAY, January 7, 1960
10:15 to 12:45 p.m. Re: The book—‘Mormon Doctrine’

The First Presidency met with Elders Mark E. Petersen and Marion G. Romney. They submitted their report upon their examination of the book ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce McConkie.

These brethren reported that the manuscript of the book ‘Mormon Doctrine’ has not been read by the reading committee; that President Joseph Fielding Smith [President of the Twelve at the time] did not know anything about it until it was published. Elder Petersen stated that the extent of the corrections which he had marked in his copy of the book (1067) affected most of the 776 pages of the book. He also said that he thought the brethren should be under the rule that no book should be published without a specific approval of the First Presidency.

I stated that the decision of the First Presidency and the Committee should be announced to the Twelve.

It was agreed that the necessary corrections are so numerous that to republish a corrected edition of the book would be such an extensive repudiation of the original as to destroy the credit of the author; that the republication of the book should be forbidden and that the book should be repudiated in such a way as to save the career of the author as one of the General Authorities of the Church. It was also agreed that this decision should be announced to the Council of the Twelve before I talk to the author.

Elder Petersen will prepare an editorial for publication in the Improvement Era, stating the principle of approval of books on Church doctrine.”

“FRIDAY, January 8, 1960
11:55 to 12:15 p.m.

The First Presidency held a meeting. We decided that Bruce R. McConkie’s book, ‘Mormon Doctrine’ recently published by Bookcraft Company, must not be re-published, as it is full of errors and misstatements, and it is most unfortunate that it has receive such wide circulation. It is reported to us that Brother McConkie has made corrections to his book, and is now preparing another edition. We decided this morning that we do not want him to publish another edition.

We decided, also, to have no more books published by General Authorities without their first having the consent of the First Presidency. (see January 7, 1960)”

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon193.htm

As harsh as this sounds, ignoring what the last big, popular LDS “authority” had to say and just swallowing with an embarrassed shrug whatever the new guy is telling you, is essentially the LDS party line. This has become far more difficult to do since the advent of modern, affordable, publishing capabilities, combined with the ability to record these “authorities” in sound and video.

Six years later, after submitting to all the corrections noted by the Brethren, McConkie pressed President McKay to allow a reprint. McKay relented. Rather than reveal McConkie’s lack of insight in his original work, Mormonism, well used to brainwiping itself and starting over with the next big authority, ignored the first edition, and embraced the revised book as next to Divine:

After more than 50 years, Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine , one of the most influential LDS books of the 20th century, has quietly gone out of print.

The encyclopedic explanation of LDS teachings, first published in 1958, went through 40 printings, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Deseret Book has decided not to reprint the classic volume, said spokeswoman Gail Halladay, because of “low sales.”

“The demand is no longer there,” said Halladay, managing director for marketing and communications.

From the day it came off the presses, though, Mormon Doctrine , was at once wildly popular to many and deeply troubling to more than a few, even at the highest levels of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Several passages about the Roman Catholic Church and McConkie’s views of blacks were seen as especially offensive.

Although McConkie, an LDS apostle who died in 1985, took sole responsibility from the start for Mormon Doctrine ‘s content, it often was quoted over the pulpit and treated by members as quasi-official. The book, with its presumptive title, seemed to provide an answer to every question and left little room for ambiguity.

“ Mormon Doctrine served two generations of the Mormon rank and file as the main authoritative source of LDS teachings,” said LDS sociologist Armand Mauss. “With its authoritative tone and constant promotion from high places, it came to be regularly cited in the church curriculum, especially in [Church Educational System] materials, and soon took on almost a scriptural stature.”

To assemble the volume, McConkie, son-in-law of LDS Church President Joseph Fielding Smith, drew on Mormon scriptures, prophetic sermons and commonly held beliefs. He put them together in alphabetical order and with a tone of certainty.

Still, many complained that it did not fairly reflect the diversity of opinion among Latter-day Saints and their leaders.

“The book would more accurately have been entitled, Mostly Mormon Doctrine ,” Mauss wrote in an e-mail from his home in Irvine, Calif.

The book was even challenged by LDS President David O. McKay, who led the church from 1951 to 1970.

…

“Nonetheless, McConkie audaciously approached McKay six years later and pushed for publication of the book in a revised form,” according to Prince and Wright. McKay responded that “if republished,” the book should be clearly marked as McConkie’s work and not an official church publication.

McConkie took that as a go-ahead, Prince and Wright wrote.

“The book became one of the all-time best-sellers in Mormondom,” they wrote, “achieving the near-canonical status that McKay had fought unsuccessfully to avoid, and setting a tone of doctrinal fundamentalism, antithetical to McKay’s personal philosophy, that remains a legacy of the church to this day.”

…

Prince said he “never saw anything in Bruce McConkie that was mean or un-Christian,” but the LDS scientist nonetheless was “delighted” by news that Mormon Doctrine no longer would be published.

“His book,” Prince said, “has done some serious damage.”

In the first edition, Prince said, it was his “diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church that did the most harm, but subsequently, the real damage has been his statements about blacks.”

After the LDS Church opened its all-male priesthood to blacks in 1978, McConkie deleted his previous statement predicting that never would happen. Even in the most recent edition, though, McConkie wrote that God cursed Cain with “a mark of a dark skin, and he became the ancestor of the black race.”

Mauss, the sociologist, thinks the book is going out of print “none too soon, especially given the current public-relations preoccupation of the LDS Church.”

The volume’s continued availability after its wide distribution, he said, will “continue to provide critics of the church with an enduring basis for claiming, however unfairly, that ‘Mormon doctrines’ are non-Christian or anti-Christian, and that the church is a racist institution.”

“Elder McConkie was an apostle and a good man but a man of his times,” said Darius Gray, former president of the

Genesis Branch for black Mormons. “Sadly his times included a period in this nation when not all men were judged by the content of their character but rather the color of their skin.”

The gospel of Jesus Christ never has been a respecter of persons, said Gray, co-producer with Margaret Blair Young of a documentary film, “Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons.”

“The LDS Church is a young church,” he said, “and, as it has grown, it has become more inclusive, embracing of all God’s creations.”

The continual publication of Mormon Doctrine seemed to suggest an approval of the concepts and attitudes of a former time, Gray said. By not reprinting it, “a weight will have been lifted off the body of the church. We have thankfully moved on.”

.com/2010/05/23/bruce-mcconkies-mormon-doctrine-out-of-print-due-to-low-sales/

http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_15137409

Not apparent in the above article, is the happy eventuality that David O McKay, who vehemently resented McConkie’s attitude, rude style, and a lot of his theology, passed away four years after the publication of his Mormon Doctrine second edition. His father-in-law, Joseph Fielding Smith, who’s own theology McConkie had almost exclusively been paraphrasing, left as president of the Quorum of the Twelve and became the next president of the church. Oddly enough, McConkie soon moved into the Quorum of Twelve. Suddenly, McConkie’s unauthorized book wasn’t quite so bad after all, and he could preach it with apostolic authority, particularly on issues like the Curse of Cain or Negroes getting the priesthood—issues upon which McKay and Joseph Fielding Smith via Bruce R McConkie strongly disagreed.

I’m not concerned here much with what Mormon doctrine is. I’m simply exploring how Mormon doctrine gets to be Mormon doctrine. And more importantly, how you as an investigator or member of the LDS church can determine what really is your obligation to believe, to accept as “the gospel,” as Mormons would put it. The Mormon “gospel” isn’t mind you, “Jesus saved me amen.” It’s a very complicated litany of beliefs that adds up to “The Church.”

There is a huge base of what I call “hard” LDS doctrines that really haven’t budged from the days of Joseph Smith. Almost all of these originated with Joseph Smith. Most of the rest are little bursts of insight professed by Smith’s contemporaries or later leadership that sprang directly from something Joseph Smith once said. One of these would be the notion that mankind is literally the kin of God. Jesus is our literal brother, and God the Father is literally our Father. This crosses physical and spiritual lines to mean that God and man are of the same species, and that mankind can grow to become like our Father the same way a human child can grow to be like its father. But through the years, the urge to expand upon this concept or define it further, has tended to get a bit dodgy–from the top to the bottom of the LDS church.

Joseph Smith’s first step into “heretical” anti-Trinitarian unorthodoxy  was the “First Vision.” Mormonism has never doubted from that point onward that there are three distinct and individual members of the “Godhead.” Smith’s terminology was ironically stolen from Jean Cauvan, who also used “Godhead” rather than “Trinity,” because frankly, Cauvan, or “John Calvin,” couldn’t find any Trinitarian language in the Bible itself either. He was persuaded however to find some, when his early detractors formed a lynch mob, dragged him before the local church authorities, and they nearly excommunicated him for it. At that point Calvin begrudgingly conceded to pick up the required Trinitarian jargon and at least pay lip service to the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds—neither of which he actually considered authoritative. That adjustment having thus been made, Calvin’s theology became immensely popular in “orthodox” Protestantism. Calvin indeed, nearly invented what we in America call “Protestantism.”

But Calvin probably saw in Acts 7, exactly what Joseph Smith said he saw personally in the thickets of Upstate New York: God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ, appearing as two distinct and identical beings in human form. In Acts 7:55, Stephen identifies these two as the Father and Jesus Christ. Stephen says these two Biblical characters appeared to him as separate beings. Luke, the presumed author of Acts, obviously agrees with Stephen’s assessment. Furthermore, Luke claims Stephen was first visited by the presence of a third entity, a spirit entity, the Holy Ghost—again, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same place, in three separate forms, the Holy Ghost filling Stephen’s his heart, and the other two Deities appearing before him physically. Even this perfectly traditional, Christian and orthodox source gives Mormonism three distinctly separate beings with or without Smith’s vision. This testament appears in canon, from a Sainted witness, Stephen, and a Sainted, Apostolic scribe, Luke. But of course, you have Joseph Smith’s replication of this experience concurring with Acts 7 on top of that. So this bit is easy: The Father and Son are again, in Mormonism, unquestionably two “perfected” or “glorified” physical beings and the Holy Ghost is just that: a Spirit.

I’ve looked by the way, for Christian depictions of Saint Stephen’s First Vision. They’re markedly absent from the icon repositories. This is because they would look exactly like Joseph Smith’s First Vision, and blow the hell out of all of Christianity since 326 AD and the Council of Nicea.

http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/acts/7?lang=eng

You may well ask, what is a “perfected” or “glorified” body? That’s where it starts to get sticky. That’s were knowledge starts to get replaced with intuition, sophistry, intellectualism, or just a hunch. Or worse yet, in Mormonism, you get your own “personal revelation,” and run around shooting your mouth off about it for generations until it sticks.

When you open the door to re-conceptualizing the nature of God and Man, what follows is that prophets, apostles, janitors and ward clerks all feel equally empowered to walk through that magic portal and explore the vast open spaces of the “Restoration.” God’s intentions, express and implied on the matter, are generally far more limited than those who claim to seek His wisdom in all things.

We find the whole culture of Mormonism pondering just what the relationship of God’s physical body is to ours, how man’s spiritual beginnings are integrated into a mortal frame, why the Holy Ghost doesn’t have a body of any sort, and so forth. For authoritative answers to all this pondering and questioning, at one time, with a handful of members and the prophet Joseph Smith alive and kicking, you would just go up and ask him. He’d talk to God about it, and give you an answer sometimes instantly, not just in the name of God, but he would deliver the very word of the Lord in First Person. Most of these tidbits of God’s Word were written down, went before the leadership, sustained by the membership, and became canon scripture.

Now, even though in Joseph Smith’s day you might well have God’s wishes for you personally delivered by a prophetic mouthpiece of the Lord in First Person, if it was just you writing it down, especially scribbling it out later from memory, well, that only means something to you. Assuming you got it down right, which is a big assumption, it may be a great personal bit of insight, but has no more binding doctrinal authority on you or anyone else than an autographed baseball card from Babe Ruth would have the authority to get you a contract with the major leagues. If you didn’t get it right, then you have a problem not just for you, but for a whole people of faith. Mormons love to dig this stuff out of scrapbooks, family Bibles, pioneer journals and old conference talks. Since 1847 they’ve been reading, sanctifying, and passing this crap around out there in “Zion.” And then every generation’s “authorities” tag onto the heritage, a little bit of their own alleged insight.

For instance, I used the language, “mankind can grow to become like our Father the same way a human child can grow to be like its father,” in my quick sketch of the doctrine in examination at the moment. Let’s pretend I’m Joseph Smith. Let’s pretend that Parley P Brigham LaVerle Widstoe wrote it down in his journal a day or two after I said that from memory, but now you’re reading me nearly two hundred years later. Did I really mean the “same” way, or did I only mean to imply a similar relationship?

The “same” way could mean that humans just physically evolve into Gods. I could have meant that God started as pond scum and evolved His way up from tadpoles to fish to reptiles to mammals to monkeys and so on. You could postulate that mankind is phase-one of becoming Divine in a very Darwinian sense. “Similar” however, might only mean that even though the organic physics of the process may be entirely different, the familial relationship is the same from the standpoint of intelligence and spirit.

The point is, even if quoted verbatim in the surviving record, you can’t be certain what I, as Joseph Smith meant, almost two hundred years ago. And you can’t ask me.

Joseph Smith has also written that we existed in a spiritual body before this earthly body, and that spiritual matter is simply a finer type of matter than temporal matter. This isn’t debated doctrine at all either. OK then, how is the crossover between the two types of matter and existence accomplished? Why is this crossover even necessary? Did God also begin as an intelligence, organize Himself into a spirit, and then evolve or manufacture Himself a mortal body? Did He then move on to perfect his mortal body over time into His present form? And how do I advance this line of understanding? What resources do I have? What role does logic or science or other wisdom play in figuring out this puzzle? Do I conclude that Jesus was an alien-human hybrid, and the Virgin Mary was enveloped by a cloaked shuttle sent from God’s mothership and received her implanted Divine DNA bundle through a non-physical trans-matter probe?

Don’t laugh. It’s not so funny. There’s a whole class of LDS gospel hobbyists who think they’re entitled to explore both that sort of vernacular and the exact mechanisms of Celestial reproduction.

With any allegedly “authoritative” Mormon source, I always go back to the same question I have about any “canon” or any other authoritative record: is that what the guy actually said? Now, in the case of the Gospels and Biblical texts, no, there were no shorthand geniuses taking dictation. Everything is from memory, everything was recorded years, decades, hundreds of years after-the-fact and filtered through generations of copiers and editors. As McConkie claims, yes, the only way we have of “proofing” canon is against other canon. From several canon authors we can eliminate some of the goofier theories at least. IE:

On the question of the Mormon conception of a Godhead, apart from divining Truth from a hundred slightly conflicting Biblical verses, Mormons have a very spelled-out version of the doctrine in the D&C, from the Articles of Faith, the very first of which is:

1 We ^abelieve in ^bGod, the Eternal Father, and in His ^cSon, Jesus Christ, and in the ^dHoly Ghost.

http://lds.org/scriptures/pgp/a-of-f/1?lang=eng

To flog this dead horse one more time: Mormons believe there are definitely three distinct personages in the Godhead. The Father and the Son are determined to have “perfected” physical bodies. The Holy Ghost has a spiritual body—but in LDS theology this would simply mirror His physical body-to-be. It is also taught that the Holy Ghost will some day have a physical body as well, but you know, at the moment I’d really have to do some research to tell you where to confirm that in the canon, because at that point we come to the end of the certainty.

It was been universally surmised initially however, that the whole point of what Joseph Smith meant to say was that we’re literal children of God. All of us. We are not born the inherently evil offspring of Satan. We don’t have to be “saved” from our hellish fate with our hellish natural born father the devil, by being adopted into God’s family. We were born children of a noble birthright and always have been His children, even before birth. Calvin was full of crap. That was radical enough for Mormonism when Joseph Smith was first explaining it to the world. It certainly pissed off the Calvinists.

Joseph Smith said that not only did God the Father and Jesus Christ His Son have physical bodies, but we are physically and spiritually related to them. This further applied to every one of us in or out of this or that church or not. Black, white, pagan, heathen, elect or not elect. All of human kind were God’s children. That’s all the farther Joseph Smith ever really took the doctrine however.

Mormon culture was founded originally by free-thinking, “enlightened” souls keen to explore intellectual and theological liberty. For many a generation, every single Mormon of any slight position or rank felt compelled to lecture and write and promulgate and plumb the depths of every minor theological or doctrinal suggestion ever half-spoken or jotted down by Joseph Smith–even if Smith had been pondering in jest. Today’s Mormonism however has been re-crafted with a quick sketch, a flip chart, a challenge to baptism, a lot of praying, and waiting for a burning bosom to confirm you should sign up. If you don’t weep in the first discussion you’re probably not good Mormon material. So conversely, today’s Mormonism has for generations, systematically repelled the same sort of intellectually and theologically curious, enlightened, free-thinkers who founded the church. Thus we find it now produces shepherds who talk softly and carry a big stick like Bruce R McConkie instead of insightful, inspired, pastoral theologians.

Even the best of sheep are not theologians. They just chew the theological grass–any theological grass, you lead them to. Only in the McConkie model, you drive sheep where you want them to go. That’s American style shepherding. Train some dogs and let them loose on the flock. They’ll all end up in the pen where you want them to be.

It is not surprising then that the LDS church finds itself now still idling and chugging the worn-out engine of its gospel bandwagon around the safe retreat of the Wasatch Front, never daring to theologically venture far from the nearest gas station and repair garage. Organizationally the church is expanding its horizons and doing great business, but theologically and prophetically speaking, it is in a very retrograde condition. It’s no longer “revealing” or “restoring” insight into God, the universe and everything, every day in wilder and woolier ways. More importantly, it doesn’t seem to know how to back the old jalopy-towed bandwagon out of the several box canyons and blind alleys previous leadership has unwittingly, and repeatedly piled and rammed it into over the generations.

Today’s LDS leadership must look back to Joseph Smith and the early days of the Restoration, in much the same way the Early Christian Church looked back at Christ’s ministry towards the end of its second century on earth, after losing its First President, our Lord, Jesus Christ, and then all His original apostles. And just like the Apostolic Fathers who scrambled to preserve what little written records they had back in those days, the LDS church went through an era where there was an abundance of writing and theological wrangling, based upon what early Latter-day Saints like Parley P Pratt for instance had extrapolated from teachings by Joseph Smith.

Parley Pratt invented Mormon pamphleteering, or “tracting” as it is called today. One of the big problems with Pratt in particular, and the entire “Restoration” movement, is that it borrowed a lot from the “Primitive Gospel Movement,” which among other revolutionary ideas, felt that written creeds were an abomination compared to Holy Scripture. Anything that cannot be extracted from Holy Scripture is not Church dogma they held. Period.

Parley Pratt, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and the very core of the LDS church as organized officially on 6 April 1830 with six total members, thought for the most part that the church was as “Restored” and as “Organized” as it ever needed to be. Those 13 Articles of Faith Joseph came up with were quite enough. For some early Mormons then, there remained a lot of organizational tension in the group as Joseph Smith continued to have more and more visions, write more and more scripture, reveal more and more dogma, and the LDS church started to be more and more centrally “instructed.”

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V15N03_15.pdf

Parley Pratt and most early Mormons, leaders or not, felt liberated to take the new canon, from the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrine and Covenants, or the mouth and pen of Joseph Smith, and with this measuring stick as a central jumping-off point, just go nuts with their pondering and praying and studying, like drunken prophetic sailors.

The bottom line is, to this day, the LDS church as an organization, has not dealt with the issue of what is or isn’t Mormon doctrine in a unified, coherent, harmonized fashion. I do not mean that they have not obfuscated, banned, redacted, sanitized, reprinted, republished, and sent out hit men like Bruce McConkie and the Correlation Police to insure that what they want taught gets taught, and what they want read gets read. What they have not done is define a clear criteria or organized system for canonization, or for harmonizing sometimes hugely disparate statements of doctrine by various Mormon “Prophets” or church presidents and other high leadership over the ages.

But most importantly they haven’t bothered to do “it.” As Spencer W Kimball used to say, “Just do it.”

It seems that prophecy is more an art than a science. Prophecy is more a question of waiting for God to speak through you than the ability to know the immediate will of God just by asking any time you like. The truth is, it’s pretty hard to tell sometimes when a prophet is speaking as a prophet—even to the prophet doing the speaking. And so, from the prophet’s perspective, it’s just better that Mormons assume a prophet is always speaking as a prophet. Furthermore, the longterm problem with openly establishing a consistent criteria for Mormon doctrinal authority, is that it will eventually lead to some current “Prophet” having to authoritatively condemn a previous “Prophet” for teaching false doctrine.

In example, let’s go back to Joseph Smith’s simple revelation that God is a perfected human and that we can be like Him:

In June of 1840, apostle, and eventual LDS church president Lorenzo Snow came up with the couplet, “As man is, God once was, as God is, man may become.” Superficially, this seems to be in harmony with the Divine human origins Joseph Smith implied we had. But on the contrary, it bounds spritely beyond Smith’s teaching, almost like a nonsequiteur, leaping over what Snow obviously thought was a logical ditch to jump. Snow says God started out just like man. Smith never said that. Smith said man can become like God. Smith said that we are children of God and can become like our Father. We are the created children of our Father and we were designed by Him to become like our Creator. That’s what Joseph Smith said for sure anyway. That’s what made it into canon. This is not at all what Snow is onto here. Snow implies that if we can become like God, then he must have at some point been just like us and done the same thing. This demands that God must have had a God back then, just like we do. Take your SciFi pick folks–you guys know what a temporal paradox is, and that’s one right there. So much for an eternal God without beginning or end. That’s your basic ouroboros, the eternal snake of the universe swallowing it’s own tail forever.

Snow never really issued a binding, definitive “revelation” on the matter. Brigham Young naturally blabbed all about it off the record as usual, but the issue wasn’t specifically parsed out anywhere in LDS canon. So, the question remains, is there one eternal and unchanging God in Mormonism? Mormons would answer yes. Can we as co-eternal lesser children grow to be like Him? Mormons would also answer yes. That much would be hard, steadfast Mormon doctrine. To do any more thinking about it however, puts you on very thin theological ice. If God started out as a mere mortal who grew to be God, and by thus by implication, God had a God, and God’s God had a God, and God’s God’s God had a God……well then, God wasn’t always God, so He’s changed, and couldn’t possibly be eternal and unchanging and perfect. Amongst other things, this fuels the intellectual fires of pundits like Cleon Skousen who, from this sort of pondering, deduce things like God is only God because we voted Him into office in the Spirit World.

Apparently, at least one recent LDS president had time to do some thoughtful reconsidering of the LDS official commitment to this whole apocryphal line of reasoning–before he kicked the bucket and left it for somebody else to reverse:

Question: “Is this the teaching of the church today, that God the Father was once a man like we are?”

Hinckley: “I don’t know that we teach it. I don’t know that we emphasize it. I haven’t heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don’t know. I don’t know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don’t know a lot about it and I don’t know that others know a lot about it.“
- Interviewing Gordon B. Hinckley, Time Magazine, Aug 4, 1997
http://home.teleport.com/~packham/gbh-god.htm

Question: “Don’t Mormons believe that God was once a man?”
Hinckley: “I wouldn’t say that. There was a little couplet coined, “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” Now that’s more of a couplet than anything else.“
- Interviewing Gordon B. Hinckley, San Francisco Chronicle, April 13, 1997, p 3/Z1

Church apologists explain Hinckley’s public statements:

“The real question should be, is President Snow’s couplet an accurate reflection of LDS doctrine? Everything Latter-day Saints teach about God is in agreement with the rest of the Christian world, with the exception of His nature. Joseph Smith said God is in the same form as we are, because we were created in His image as the Bible plainly and clearly tells us… But again, we do not emphasize Heavenly Father’s past, but the possibility of our future.
- The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research (FAIR)

http://www.i4m.com/think/leaders/god_was_man.htm

For what it’s worth, Joseph Smith’s assertions about man’s kinship with Deity do in fact have an ancient basis in both Christian and Jewish theology. The concept was called “theosis.”

With this doctrine of exaltation or human deification, though, Joseph Smith wasn’t actually moving away from Judeo-Christian tradition. He was returning to a forgotten strand of it.

For ancient Christians and Jews also had a doctrine of human deification, which scholars call “theosis.”

As an early Jewish midrash or scriptural commentary expressed the belief, “The Holy One … will in the future call all of the pious by their names, and give them a cup of elixir of life in their hands so that they should live and endure forever. … (And He will also) reveal to all the pious in the world to come the Ineffable Name with which new heavens and a new earth can be created, so that all of them should be able to create new worlds.”

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700168175/Joseph-Smiths-restoration-of-theosis-was-miracle-not-scandal.html?s_cid=Email-4

President Hinckley was quite correct about Lorenzo Snow’s couplet having been de-emphasized for many decades now, at least in the official LDS teaching and support materials. The way of it is this: Lorenzo Snow had one big idea during his presidency. He came up with that cute couplet. Though he couldn’t quite canonize it or bill it as “prophecy” he flogged the hell out of it and it became the gospel fad of his era. That era passed it on for another couple of eras until, probably around the time David O McKay was yelling at Bruce McConkie for his presumptuously encyclopedic tome, and afterward into Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B Lee’s Correlation Movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Brethren, the First Presidency that is, started to try to take control of doctrinal development and clarification personally. By the time Gordon B Hinckley was having a closer look at some of these long-held folk doctrines, Snow’s couplet for one, which raised more questions than it provided answers, just didn’t seem to measure up. So it went bye-bye quietly.

http://www.bookofmormonbattles.com/Map.htm

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=15&num=1&id=464

At one time every LDS meetinghouse library would have a complete set of the Journal of Discourses, the Comprehensive History of the Church, and other collections of first-hand or near-period journal-based “histories” and “doctrinal” commentaries particularly from presidents and apostles of the church.  Many of these sorts of “authoritative” historical volumes and their later-era commentators are now commonly understood to lie in the realm of extra-canonical or apocryphal records.

At the same time the prophet-of-the-day is cleaning the bookshelves of his predecessors’ doctrinal ramblings, each new generation of LDS leadership also fears the imagined consequences of letting the non-inerrancy bunny loose in the garden, or the non-infallibility cat officially out of the bag. The feeling amongst the “Brethren” it seems, has long been that to admit that even a single past leader was apparently pulling his “doctrinal” thoughts out of the wrong orifice, rather than giving verbatim dictation from Deity, would collapse the entire Kingdom of God like a house of cards. The Truth however, exists in a sphere unto itself. That’s another Joseph Smith-based, hard Mormon doctrine. It’s an “Eternal Principle.” Not even God can change that.

Covering arse is not an Eternal Principle. Personally, I think cleaning doctrinal house and formally admitting to failed records or failed traditions would serve God’s purposes better than covering arse. It would only free the church structure of its weak members and bring in a more solid foundation and an overall stronger leadership as well as general body of believers who are less fragile and more capable of taking the work to a very harsh world.

But then, I don’t run the place.

The bulk of LDS membership today hears exactly what they want to hear and will believe what they want to believe, in regards to current prophetic leadership. They will believe that the current “prophet” is the only authority in the church, and Jesus gives him direct and daily instructions about everything and anything. Most Mormons really really need to believe this. It’s their whole “testimony.” The whole garment of their membership in the church hangs utterly upon this one flimsy coat hook. It would spiritually and emotionally devastate most Mormons to know that the truth about the “restored” church is that usually, LDS “prophets” and “general authorities” say their prayers, read up on the subject, and then have to discern, decode, and try to understand the Will of God from the same subtle workings of the Spirit that you and I do.

There isn’t a better example of this Mormon emotional dependency on a single Divine Oracle than the first time a change of “The Prophets” or church presidents took place after Joseph Smith’s murder. A meeting was called in Nauvoo, In the midst of much contention over the line of LDS leadership succession, lead in part by Smith’s wife Emma and her son’s claim to the ministry through a claimed blessing given to Joseph Smith III by his father. Sidney Rigdon made a claim for the job based on proximity of his calling as First Counselor in the First Presidency. Brigham Young’s claim came as the standing president of the intact Quorum of Twelve. He argued that the Twelve held in trust all the keys of Melchizedek Priesthood, and that the First Presidency had been dissolved upon the death of the First President. Until officers of the First Presidency were again called and that quorum reformed, Young claimed title as the chief presiding officer of the Church, and holder of all related priesthood keys.

http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_church_leadership/Succession_in_the_Presidency_of_the_Church

Now, legalistic arguments like this just aren’t sexy enough for some Mormons. The story goes that Brigham Young stood up before the crowd and at least some portion of that gathering suddenly saw him change into the voice and person of Joseph Smith—the sign from God that confirmed his mantle of authority. This was really really popular when I was a kid. It came right out of the primary manuals and everything.

The only problem is that no one talked about this amazing transformation when it happened. There are no journals, letters, or newspaper accounts written at the time of the meeting that would back up this amazing story. It is true that such a meeting took place. And it is true that both Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young spoke at the meeting. But no account of the transformation was recorded at that time.

Historian Richard Van Wagoner has searched all diaries, journals, newspapers, and church records written shortly after the meeting and has found no evidence to verify the “miracle transformation” story. You can read more about his findings by reading his published report.

Brigham’s speech was reported on in detail in both Nauvoo newspapers and recorded by scribes for the official church records. Hundreds of members present wrote about Brigham’s persuasive argument in great detail in their private journals. Nowhere was there mention of the miraculous or divine.

So where does the story come from? There is no recorded account of the transformation until many years later, after the Saints were settled in Utah. In 1857, 13 years after the speech, Albert Carrington is the first to mention the transformation. In a speech before a huge gathering of Saints, he said that he couldn’t tell Brigham from Joseph that day when Brigham was speaking. Soon others were making the same claim.

Records even show that it was impossible for several members who made the claim to have witnessed the miracle to have even been in Nauvoo at the time of the meeting.

But not all members got caught up in the new story. Bishop George Miller, present at the gathering, later recalled that nothing supernatural had occurred on that day. Young made a “long and loud harangue,” Miller later wrote, for which I “could not see any point in the course of his remarks than to overturn Sidney Rigdon’s pretensions.”

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/transfiguration.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young

I guess this was supposed to be Brigham Young’s big miracle or something, or at least a lot of the faithful felt he needed one. At the time of the alleged miracle naturally, the first Mormon prophet had been murdered and Young was contending for his now open position. Likewise, at the time the story first appeared over a decade later, not coincidentally, there was an Army marching out to destroy them from the States. Brigham Young needed all the leadership credibility he could muster to hold his people together in the crisis. No doubt, some of his followers tried to help him out by producing some really convincing testimony in his favor, since Brigham was in the heat of many debates and contentions regarding how to respond to the invasion force.

In pioneer times, obviously an orderly transition of leadership in the corporation wasn’t thrilling or convincing enough to inspire men, women, and children to struggle, fight, and die all across the Great Plains for reasons of parliamentary procedure. The fact remains however, that, not since Joseph Smith “restored” the church, has LDS leadership openly claimed to have been led via bona-fide and openly glorious “revelation” in the same sense that Smith actually claimed to talk personally, face-to-face with Deity and Angels in a Q&A setting. Neither has any subsequent LDS leadership actually laid claim to speaking directly as the Voice of God, meaning relaying directly or channeling the express words and will of Deity, speaking in the First-Person of Jesus, as did Joseph Smith in hundreds of distinct, sometimes very personal and specific revelations now canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants, and many others not so canonized:

Thus sayeth the Lord… And Joseph Smith quoted the Lord almost daily. He and the Brethren hung out in the room above Newell Whitney’s store and held lengthy question-and-answer sessions about nearly everything, and Smith would right then and there give them the direct Word of God. Or he’d come back the next day having written down a vision or revelation, and he’d call it that, and present it as the verbatim word of the Lord.

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Schools_of_the_Prophets

http://jesuschrist.lds.org/josephsmith/v/index.jsp?vgnextfmt=tab3&vgnextoid=20ceda73c0b52010VgnVCM1000001f5e340aRCRD

Starting with the Utah experience, starting with Brigham Young to put a fine point on it, Mormonism found itself short on prophecy, long on hardship, and it began to invent encouraging, seemingly harmless little stories to make themselves feel better about themselves and their leaders. Their leaders in turn tried to promote everything they uttered as if it had the same prophetic insight as the ruminations of Joseph Smith. They weren’t always on the mark like Smith seemed to be. In a closed society, all of these wishful, sometimes whimsical if faithful efforts, evolved into a warm tapestry of homespun mythology, as Mormonism kept trying to fill the pit of mystical emptiness that Joseph Smith had once filled daily via connecting them directly to God.

Eventually, “harmless” Mormon mythology got sucked into the culture as fact and thus became an integral part of the religion as well. Since it was just them, out there in that hole, and they were all Saints, and they all believed anyway, nobody cared if it their little stories were all entirely true. It felt true. And they didn’t care if it sounded stupid. Mormons don’t like smart people anyway. Smart people don’t make good Mormons, they had decided long ago. Simple mindedness became a virtue in Brigham Young’s church. Their little anecdotes and couplets and experimental theological ramblings raised their spirits and promoted the “Gospel.” That’s all that mattered to them.

The same sort of thing happened in the mountain isolation of the Appalachian range in Tennessee and the south. The only difference is Brigham Young decided Adam was God, and the Christian hillbillies decided you should dance around, drink poison and handle vipers at church if you really love Jesus.

Wackiness is wackiness.

Glenn Beck Part 4: My Favorite Klingon

By 1963 there wasn’t a mainstream corporate sponsor or conservative organization that would have anything to do with Willard Cleon Skousen. The American Security Council kicked his arse out saying he’d gone off the deep end. William C. Mott, judge advocate general of the US Navy and ASC member said Skousen was “money mad…totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen

That year, Robert Welch, John Birch Society founder, claimed that president Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and Skousen jumped on it with both feet. Skousen’s clients threw him to the curb. The National Association of Manufacturers, formely gracious anti-Communist sponsors of Skousen’s speaking tours, released an official condemnation of both Skousen and the John Birch Society, expressing its intent to disassociate itself from any individual or party who subscribed to their views. Skousen just wrapped his critics into the conspiracy and authored a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”

Except for every High Priest Group in Mormondom, Klingon Skousen laid low for a lot of the ’60s. When he resurfaced at the end of the decade he was promulgating a new family of conspiracies that bundled all the world’s problems into the doings of the capitalist “dynastic rich,” as he called them. Specifically, Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. These culprits Skousen now claimed, were using communist and leftist agents like Ho Chi Minh and the American civil rights movement to accomplish their evil goals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen

Skousen claimed in The Naked Communist that Commies were out to take over the world because they were evil dominators of the human soul.

In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

— Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian^[18]

…Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

Skousen warns readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:

. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:

“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”

(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)

Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:

“Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.

“Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

The Naked Capitalist on the other hand, now claimed that Communists were only puppets of the dynastic rich. The Council of Foreign Relations and other Liberal internationalist groups were really the minions of these ultra-rich, who wanted to manipulate world events and nations into a single One World Government, or a New World Order.

Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

…”The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

At this point Skousen became the Godfather of countless offshoots and Skousen cells in every conspiratorially oriented organization on the face of the planet. He boasted before he was done, of authoring 44 books and pamphlets, but in my father’s words, he actually just wrote the same book 44 times. His diatribes, particularly corrupted every priesthood quorum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You could also say he infiltrated the Boy Scouts as well, because in the LDS church they are one and the same. The LDS church is the single largest affiliate of Scouting USA. Entering the 1970’s Skousen led the charge against the American Civil Rights Movement. ET Benson’s grandson Steve writes:

Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.” The article asserted that:

” . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”

Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”

He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”

Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:

” . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.”

In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:

“. . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . . Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .” [1976]

Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”
Skousen further declared:

“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”

He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.” [1987]

[Skousen had also previously claimed that the US would fall to Communism by 1973.]

In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:

“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.

(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431

Unable to content himself with any single paranoid theory, Skousen moved from frantic brainfart of idiocy to frantic brainfart of idiocy, as one world-ending conspiracy and one set of heinous traitors after another failed to bring America down into Satanic bondage. In 1971, Skousen founded The Freeman Institute, which claimed it intended to provide BYU students a place to read both sides of any political issue from original sources. The truth is, it got weirder and weirder until was thrown off campus In 1982. It was probably no coincidence that church president Spencer W Kimball was announcing the construction of a temple behind the Iron Curtain in Freiberg Germany, and BYU president Dallin Oaks was battling with world academia to maintain the university’s scholarly credibility in light of Skousen’s wild-arsed political and “historical” hackings, and the spawn of similarly eccentric BYU “scholars” like Hugh Nibley and others, who were inventing the pretend science of “Book of Mormon Archeology,” linking Joseph Smith to ancient Egyptian texts, and delving into Masonic, folk-magic and mystical connections to all of the above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Nibley

By 1983, Skousen’s Freeman Institute had re-branded itself the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), and headquartered itself in a survivalist compound in Malta, Idaho. Most importantly, it would be dead as a doornail right now if not for Glenn frigging Beck…

In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with theConstitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.^[19][20] Skousen’s proposals with the group included a plan to convert the Social Security system to private retirement accounts, as well as a plan that he claimed would completely wipe out the national debt.

Although Skousen was not a tax protester, he did campaign for several proposals to eliminate the federal income tax. One proposal, the Liberty Amendment, precluded the federal government from involvement in any activities that competed with private enterprise and returned federally-owned land to the states.

In 1987, controversy erupted in California when the state briefly considered using Skousen’s book, The Making of America, as a textbook for California schools. Statements in the book regarding slavery, and its use of the term “pickaninny” as a label for slave children engendered a heated debate as to whether the book was appropriate.

…In one instance, the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”^[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon_Skousen

Now, some of Skousen’s political proposals admittedly sound fine to me. His history however, is rubbish. His obsession with finding a Commie or “Insider” under every bed is embarassingly naïve. In fairness, scholars would likely say the same thing about my scribblings. But I don’t care what “scholars” think any more than Cleon Skousen did, so here’s my main point for you Glenn Beck: Skousen’s fairly rapid demise had been set in motion in his affiliation particularly with Tim LaHaye and their Born Again, evangelical dynasty. What had begun to happen was a homogenization of Mormon loony conspiracy freaks with more mainstream Christian Republican Conservative political organizations. That’s a lot like your ministry Glenn. And by no accident I’m sure, as a Skousen acolyte. The Christian Right however, is Christian. Even if they liked Skousen’s patriotic, conspiratorial lippping-off to the Powers-That-Be, Klingon Skousen and his Mormon zealots already figured into the very center of most of the era’s expanding Apocalyptic Christian conspiracy theories. The more Mormon folklore Skousen worked into the conversations in his primarily Christian Conservative think-tanks, the more his Christian “friends” began to think that they didn’t want Mormons coming to the rescue of the Constitution.

There is no “Nephite Cycle” in the Bible. There is no “White Horse Prophecy” in Christendom. Skousen was just too weird, too insanely desperate to save America, too embarrassingly obvious in his belief that Mormons were Christians, too clearly earnest in his professions that Mormons are going to save the world for Christ, and that Mormonism would be the Constitutional Army of Liberation in America, not the Christian Right.

The bottom line is, Christians have no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. The Constitution is an enlightened document. It arose out of Deism, Masonry, and the European Enlightenment, not the Bible. For God’s sake, for the sake of all mankind, for the benefit of all that is holy, you cannot look at the concepts in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, and connect them with the oppressive tenets of “Historic Christianity.”

Even ignoring all his other lunacy, Skousen was fundamentally suicidal in falling into lock-step with Christian Nation theories. Declaring America a Christian Nation leads to Carthage Jail, Liberty Jail, the Haun’s Mill Massacre, Johnson’s Army and an American Geneva based upon Calvin’s oppressive “Christian” model.

That’s Satan’s Plan.

Which brings me again brother Beck, to your personal political pornography, throughwhich you must enjoy yourself immensely and repeatedly if your gushing commentaries are any indication: The Five Thousand Year Leap. This is Klingon Skousen’s “inspired” masterpiece:

Since this book was all over the New York Times bestseller list in 2009, and generated an unprecedented interest in this until-now obscure author, it deserves an extended discussion. The book is an analysis of the Founding Fathers of the United States and their political and economic beliefs, written from a decidedly conservative (in the modern American sense) point of view, but the content is not particularly explicitly Mormon to the degree that would alienate readers of other faiths. The title of the book refers to both the author’s belief that the earth was about 5000 years old at the time of the founding of the United States, and also that social and economic progress took a great 5000 year leap forward nearly instantaneously upon the founding of the United States after centuries of slow progress and stagnation. The book was originally published in the wake of a conservative shift in American politics around the time of the election of Ronald Reagan, and more specifically in the context of a western U.S. protest movement against federal land policies circa 1981 known as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” which was especially strong in the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.

The book begins with a discussion of the political spectrum. Skousen asserts that the view of the “far right” as Fascism and the “far left” as Communism is erroneous and that Fascism and Communism are really the same thing: “ruler’s law” (or, law dictated by a single ruler or party). He proposes that a more accurate political spectrum would be: “far right” is anarchy or no government, “far left” is any form of “ruler’s law” or totalitarianism, and the political center is a limited representative government of, by and for the people. The first section moves on to a discussion of the Founding Fathers and places both the Jeffersonian Democrats and the Hamiltonian Federalists in the political center of their day. He draws parallels between the laws and government of the ancient Israelites and Anglo-Saxon common law (and, although Skousen shows no sign of believing in British Israelism himself, cites a British Israelist writer – Howard B. Rand – as his source on this) and asserts that both were the basis of the U.S. Constitution. He believes the first attempt at forming a United States government in the Articles of Confederation failed because they erred too far toward his definition of the right (anarchy), while the strong-central-government faction of the Federalists and most European monarchieserred too far to the left (ruler’s law). The United States Constitution, on the other hand, was right in the center where it should have been. He attributes this to “28 principles” which he believes the Founders held to, and make up the second portion of the book:

1. Natural law as the legitimate basis of government (he defines natural law here as divine law derived from God)
2. A virtuous and moral people
3. Virtuous and moral leaders
4. Without religion a government of free people cannot be maintained
5. All things were created by God
6. All men are created equal
7. Equal rights, not equal things
8. Unalienable rights
9. To protect man’s rights, God has revealed divine law
10. Sovereignty of the people
11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a tyrannical government
12. Republican form of government (“a republic, not a democracy”)
13. Protection of the people against the human frailty of their rulers
14. Property rights
15. Free-market economics
16. Separation of powers
17. Checks and balances
18. Importance of a written Constitution
19. Limited powers of government
20. Majority rule, minority rights
21. Strong local self-government
22. Government by law, not by men
23. An educated electorate
24. Peace through strength
25. Avoid entangling alliances
26. Protecting the role of the family
27. Avoiding the burden of debt
28. The United States has a “manifest destiny” to be a blessing to the entire human race

A fascinating mix, that. Many of these principles nobody would argue with; they are foundational to liberal democracy and representative government. Many of them however try to make the case that liberal democracy (Skousen prefers them term “republic” over “democracy”) and representative government can only exist when they are rooted in religion, specificallyChristianity; and that the Founders were God-fearing Christians and this (rather than, say, the values of the European Enlightenment, freethought, and liberal views on religion such asDeism) were what guided the Founders. This attempt at shoehorning liberal representative government together with essentially theocratic views makes this book an early example of a genre of historical revisionism that has since become a staple within the religious right, such as the books by David Barton. Glenn Beck is a Mormon convert and it is likely that this is the reason that out of all the thousands of possible books he could have picked, he chose to bring Skousen’s book out of obscurity as a sort of manifesto; much of the religious right has instead been promoting the more recent books by David Barton. Beck seems to have picked up on the cue and now frequently has Barton on his television and radio shows to promote his nonsense views. Beck’s promotion of Skousen’s work has led many ultraright conservatives to embrace Skousen’s distortion of the political spectrum, mainly for the purposes of blaming both Communism and Nazism on the left.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/W._Cleon_Skousen

For you Gentiles out there, I’m not going to beat this White Horse to death. I’ll just summarize my thoughts by saying The 5000 Year Creep doesn’t give me either religious or political orgasms in the way Glenn Beck seems to experience the book. I’d simply say it’s his least asinine work.

Highlighted by Skousen’s self-damning ignorance of basic Christian theology, there are a number of elements in Glenn Beck’s confused potpourri of populist paranoia that are simply suicidal to Mormonism or any other non-Christian belief system. The first of these is buying into any suggestion that the Constitution of the United States of America is born of “Christian” roots. Anyone who knows anything about Christian history would not find that very enticing, even if he were a Christian.

Christians simply don’t know what’s good for them, and a Christian Nation isn’t good for anyone, not even them. If the nation is Christian, the State defines Christianity and stifles any competing theology. That’s not a good thing. To the average Christian idiot, it sounds great. The Founding Fathers weren’t however, the average Christian idiots.

Make the State Christian, and there’s always the chance you wouldn’t be the right sort of Christian, and end up on the rack or being publicly roasted. Facts are facts, and that’s exactly what every “Christian” society has done—when it was not engaged in the wholesale extermination of non-Christians or “heretical” Christians as it re-defined itself from time to time or its subjects found inspiration in other ideas. And Mormons are not Christians. Mormons would not only be seriously screwed-over in a “Christian Nation,” they already have been. Constantly and repeatedly from day-one. To believe otherwise makes you a lackey pawn, a dupe of what Christian Nation Crusader James Kennedy called “The Holy Conpiracy.”

And how did the Holy Conspiracy work its way around the Contitutional protection of Mormonism Glenn? Do you remember? Do you even know?

In a letter to William Short Thomas Jefferson wrote:

The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. [13 April, 1820.]

Perhaps it’s Thomas Jefferson who should be called a prophet here? What else was going on in April of 1820 or thereabouts by the way…say in rural New York? And does this quote from Finis Ewing, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the most famous Presbyterian in the history of Mormonism ring a bell?

The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finis_Ewing

http://saintswithouthalos.com/p/hjs_mo_persec1.phtml

Well Glenn, at first Christianity tried to just charge Joseph Smith with plain old heresy—again and again, from New York to Missouri, and when the charges never stuck they tried wrapping heresy around fraud or some other actual legal claim and they still never got Joseph nailed properly after scores of hearings and trials. Then the good Christian ministers of Daviess County Missouri held a little meeting of all the prominent clergy, civil officials, and leading citizens in the fellowship hall. Over coffee and treats they agreed that the Constitution didn’t offer sufficient protection from Mormonism, and if they didn’t do something about it they’d be overrun with Mormon and quickly be the minority vote in the region. So they penned out their own “Secret Constitution,” which the Mormons called the “Mob Manifesto,” in which the swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to eradicate Mormonism through any means necessary.

http://www.blacklds.org/mob

The Holy Conspiracy initially discovered that if you bully Mormons away from a public polling place during an election, they beat the crap out of you. They next discovered that if you shoot at Mormons trying to vote they shoot back. Then they learned that if they shot back they could call the governor, who was part of the conspiracy to negate the Mormon vote in the first place, and he’ll gratefully issue an order of extermination for you on the grounds of treason and insurrection. Only the fact that Mormons are pretty damned good with a rifle slowed this genocidal effort down enough that God eventually reached enough still-functionally “Christian” hearts that the regional population, the national population in general, began to ask, hey, isn’t burning, beating, raping, pillaging, slaughtering and tormenting plain dumb white men women and children sort of er, evil or something? (Injins, niggers–yeah. No problem. But white folks?)

When the local Christian clergy tried to get the Mormons eradicated again in Illinois, the Holy Conspiracy had learned its lesson well from Missouri. You didn’t need secret meetings and blood oaths. You didn’t need to try to construct a treatise of your legal or moral apologetics to justify your actions. All you had to do was publish abroad Christ’s permission to exterminate the Mormon heretics and take anything you want of them for plunder, and either just out of greed, bloodlust or even missplaced “Christian” zeal, via the “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” principle, a mob will cheerfully arise to oblige. You don’t need to control the whole state militia, all you need is a key officer or two, a mob-friendly detatchment or so, and once they start hollering and shooting and point at the “enemy,” the rest of the regiment will just join in out of reflex. Once you have the Mormons shooting back to defend themselves, well, the game is on, no more explanations necessary. Look at the Mormons. They’re shooting at us. Better kill them all before they do the same to us.

But even the Illinois tactics were transparent enough that “Christians” throughout the nation looked at the “mob” violence of Nauvoo and Carthage, and while nobody could directly claim this time that actual ministers of God were leading the charge under the Christian flag, it was still condemned as inexcusably uncivilized, whether Joe Smith and the Mormons had it coming or not. Sure, in Missouri they tried to trans-substantiate “heresy” into “insurrection” or “treason” but never got it to stick. So again, after a lot of manoevering and legal bullshite, Joseph Smith’s critics in Nauvoo managed to hang “treason” on his “heresy” for acting as chair of the city council and condemning an anti-Mormon printing press. That’s what actually got him killed mind you. But like Missouri, Smith never ended up in court. In Missouri he was allowed to escape to save the state the embarassment of trying to explain their extermination order and resulting attempted genocide. In Carthage Illinois, the militia “guards” protecting Smith just parted one night and let a barely disguised mob of their fellows up the stairs to shoot the hell out of him. Again, it saved the Holy Conspiracy from all the Constitutional bickering and Christianity as usual got what it wanted without the incumberance of due process.

In Utah, the Holy Conspiracy first denied Mormonism admittance to the union as its own State of Deseret, despite more than meeting all requirements. As a state Mormons would be free to be the majority, grow, populate, civilize, and vote their own conscience and cultural or regional interests like any other citizen other of the United States. Congress however, amid much debate, admitted Utah only as a territory, where it could be administered directly by the Christian Congress.

When Brigham Young got tired of the cronies, whores, and carpetbaggers Washington kept sending out to profiteer off the blood and sweat of the Saints, as Governor, he fired an apparently unreliable guy named Magraw from the mail service, because Mormons had long been maintaining supply trails and outposts from coast-to-coast and simply tagging mail service onto the regular Mormon cargo contracts was faster and cheaper. Magraw turned out not surprizingly to have been awarded his mail contract via his well-placed Washington cronies, and like a good little Holy Conspirator, once again cried that the whole territory was in bondage of Brigham Young and disloyal to the United States. This resulted in Congress appointing a Christian governor, and sending him to usurp Brigham Young with an army of occupation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War

After a little drama, the Mormons let the new governor come right on in. The army, well, just so they got the message, that they starved out for a year, cut off and surrounded, vulnerable in the canyon. Cummings, the new guy, negotiated entry of the army, and basically nothing much happened. He reported back that nothing much seemed to be going on in the territory worth mentioning and wondered what all the fuss was about. But, the Christian camel having poked its nose into the Mormon tent, eventually the whole beast forced its way inside. And again, Christianity found it could do nothing much about Mormonism. Until it discovered polygamy.

And here’s where the Holy Conspiracy learned it could do with a stroke of the pen what it had been trying to do for decades through all the combined violence of modern warfare: they made polygamy illegal. No, it wasn’t already illegal. Nobody had thought to make it illegal. But this was Calvin’s America, and The Holy Conspiracy forged the polygamy issue into a sword it then aimed at the heart of Mormonism:

Reynolds v. United States (1878)

This was the first of the Mormon cases. Congress had passed a law making it a criminal offense to commit bigamy in any of the territories under control of the Federal government. The defendant, charged with violating this law, asserted as a defense that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and that its doctrines required him to practice polygamy or plural marriage. He claimed further that enforcement of the law against him would violate his religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court rejected this contention and affirmed the conviction….

Marriage, the Court held, is a relationship created, regulated, and protected by civil authority. The monogamous family is the basis of Western societal life, and it was never doubted that government had the power to preserve it by prohibiting polygamy. The fact that the defendant’s religious convictions require him to practice polygamy no more immunizes him from the operation of the law than would a person’s religious belief in human sacrifice immunize him from the operation of the laws against homicide. To permit religious beliefs to justify polygamy would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and would in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself….

Page 109, Church and State in the United States , Anson Phelps Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, 1964, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.

The Court’s reasoning isn’t even out of the Bible. It just pays lip-service to Christian tradition using the code-word “Western societal life” without any Biblical or Constitutional justification at all. Ignoring the spurious human sacrifice analogy, what this ruling actually does it wrest from the hands of God, the formerly Holy Bonds of Matrimony, and surrendered the institution of marriage to the authority of civil officers, who are now, by this precedent, free to administer it according to any currently popular social conventions. Like Gay marriage. Or at this point, polygamy.

Well Christianity, be careful what you wish for—you might get it. You put marriage under civil jurisdiction to feck over the Mormons, and now it’s your turn. You made marriage a strictly social and political issue, and now you’re on the losing side of the social argument, aren’t you?  Payback’s a bitch isn’t she? And she doesn’t even make you breakfast in the morning.

Here, anyone wondering why Harry Reid might be a Democrat and a Mormon too ought to have a little look at this:

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jishs/101.3-4/vitale.html

It’s a historical overview explaining how Joseph Smith voted Democrat as well, and more importantly why. As a matter of fact Glenn, in spite of self-righteous Far-Right elitists like yourself and Skousen, rather a helluva lot of Mormons are Democrats. A bunch of them are actually socialists. Probably a lot of actual Communist Party members of the church by now. It’s a big wide world.. It’s not all about Chief Skousen brown-nosing General Authorities and scaring the hell out of them with tales of world-shaking evil headed their way: Howdy brethren–what’s shakin’ on temple square today brother this and elder that. Have you heard the one about the Commie who snuck the tape recorder into the Endowment session and played it all on CCCP1?

OK, I’ll condense it: Joseph Smith was a Democrat because the Democrats like president James Buchannan initially argued that Mormons should be able to have their own state and make their own laws as they saw fit. Because the Democrats, not the Republicans, argued that the Consitution protected religious practices like plural marriages. Because the Democrats argued that specifically in polygamy there is no crime or peril to the greater good from what consenting adults want to get up to in the private sovereignty of their own homes and their own beds. Democrats argued that the citizens of a state or territory ought to be able to rule on the matter themselves according to their own social norms.

The Republicans, like party founder Justin Smith Morrill on the other hand, were arguing that Mormons were heretics and polygamy was as barbarous as slavery, and Mormons had no right to self-government in a “civilized” read: Christian, society:

Under the guise of religion, this people has established, and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world…. As well might religion be invoked to protect cannibalism or infanticide. Yet we are told, because our Constitution declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency that artful men may seek to hide, under the name of religion! However, it is impossible to twist the Constitution into the service of polygamy by any fair construction…. Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?

Sounds a bit like the Glenn Beck show. Or old recordings of Cleon Skousen.

Once Christianity finally had something with which to “legally” skewer the Mormons, once they’d essentially made at least one purely Biblical doctrine unique to Mormonism illegal on purely “Christian” grounds, they sharpened their anti-polygamy blades keener with every passing year. They wrote into laws test oaths that denied Mormons the right to vote. They defined as “treason,” not the practice of, but the mere belief in polygamy as a Biblically correct principle. Then they made even being a member of an organization that believed plural marriage to be Biblically correct, a confession of “treason.” Then they declared all the lands, funds and properties of any “treasonous” organization should be forfeit to the territorial civil authorities. They banned Mormons from running for office, so soon all civil officers in the territory were appointed by Christians in Congress, or were fellow Christians elected by a tiny Christian minority who ruled the vast Mormon majority of the region.

I want to make this clear, and not just for you Glenn Beckers, neo-Skousenites, or other religious types reading this: The Holy Conspiracy, the “Christian Nation” and its “Christian” Supreme Court, ruled in 1878, that it was perfectly legal and Constitutional to deny anyone who disagrees with “Historic Christianity’s” system of beliefs the right to participate in American politics as either voter or candidate, to own land, property, or associate with like-minded Americans. Mormons were the first official victims of actual “thought crime” legislation. Christians used this one doctrinal tool, this one almost universally agreed-to but utterly harmless Mormon Biblical oddity, to systematically strip the Mormons of every scrap of property they had. They literally stole all Mormon edifices and meetinghouses and rented them back to the church under State supervision at great profit. They made every wife a Mormon husband could be proved to have cohabitated with, a crime punishable by five years in prison. They broke up families, threw old men in jail to rot and die and left the destitute, breadwinnerless wives and children to fend for themselves.

(And of course, they carefully wrote their anti-polygamy laws so the Army and teams of Washington carpetbaggers infesting the state could continue to hump and whore around as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t set up housekeeping or make their multiple-partnered sex a legitimate, permanent arrangement.)

Glenn. That’s how a “Christan Nation” works bub. Sorry. Just is. I’m not guessing here. You’re the guy who keeps telling us to learn from history before it’s too late.

Physician heal thyself.

Christians own their own damned label. I don’t want to fight over it. In any case, Mormons can’t simply steal it and redefine the word as they see fit. That may play well in Provo, but one Mormon backwater town in the desert doesn’t amount to diddly squat in the world of politics and religion—or even the world of dictionaries. The last thing in the universe a Mormon would want to do is hand over Constitutional sovereignty to a bunch of hard-core, Bible-thumping Christians. The Founding Fathers defeated these “Historical” Christians in writing the Constitution. They pulled one over on them–Joke’s on you Calvin, Wesley, Arminius, Augustine, Luther, Pope One and Pope Two. The Great Architect of the Universe faked-out all of history’s so-called “Christians” who had been thus far perpetually claiming to worship Him via beating the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them. The religious and intellectual rebels on the Constitutional panel with free and truly inspired hearts and minds wrote God’s true will into the Constitution instead.

That’s the Mormon position Glenn. That’s Joseph Smith’s “Original Argument.” If you believe Joseph Smith that is, rather than Klingon Skousen. I know who I’ll go with. How about you?

America is not a Christian Nation and I and grateful for that. America is a pluralistic, free republic, and open religious society. We should all thank God, or the Deity of choice for it. Or no Deity at all. Thank the Founding Fathers. You may think me a weird-arse bigot and pinhead for believing anything in Mormonism, but the Constitution allows me to be a pinhead and bigot, and believe anything I want. I just don’t get to exercise my bigotry. That would infringe upon the rights of other citizens who are mutually protected by the Constitution. I can talk about it all I want though. And Glenn, one more time: That sort of religious liberty is not a Christian concept. Period.

Everybody gets their say, and nobody gets to hurt the other guy for saying it. God Bless America. Nature’s God.

Glenn Beck, you and your new “ghost” writing partner, the specter of Klingon Skousen, want to destroy America. You want to destroy the Constitution in order to save the Constitution. You want to put sinners who play cards or curse or skip church in stocks. You want to imprison or drive out homosexuals and free thinkers and scholars and anyone who would care to argue with the clergy to die alone in the wilderness. You want to burn witches and heretics–you just call them Communists and Progressives and Liberals. Glenn, you and no doubt Wee Willy Skousen would contend: that’s not what we want at all. But that’s certainly the way Police Chief Willard Cleon Skousen ran Salt Lake City when he had his crack at a theocracy. Of course you don’t want a Christian Police State Glenn. You preach about the dangers of incrementalism but you and Skousen’s ghost are both apparently too stupid to realize that’s what every single Christian Nation in the history of the world has led to.

The US Constitution is not the product of a Right Wing think tank. It’s the result of hard-fighting, enlightened, classical Liberals. Skousen’s analysis of the world’s political spectrum is the infantile, ethnocentric groaning of a myopic, egocentric, provincial paranoid who’s only ever looked as far as the next church spaghetti dinner for his understanding of either politics or religion. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, these are entirely subjective and conditional terms. A Conservative Russian is a flaming Marxist. This terminology has never been either precise or absolute. Without a context and a comprehensive, overlooking frame of reference they are as useless as anything else Cleon Skousen doesn’t quite get. Which is rather a lot. Really Glenn, don’t you have an inkling of discernment in you? What’s “Liberal” in Provo is “Conservative” in Minneapolis. What’s “Conservative” in Austin Texas is Leftist Propaganda in Orem Utah.

I’ve got news for you Glenn Beck, the louts who looted and trashed the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle weren’t from the Right. They were raving Lefties. They were self-professed Anarchists. Anarchy does not come from the Right by any known definition of Right. Police Chief Cleon Skousen was a Right Wing Zealot and he did not represent the face of Anarchy. It’s inane. Skousen argues in effect, that since the Right is always for law and order, as he clearly is, that at some point the absolute most law and order you can have is Anarchy.

Because he’s an ass.

More blatantly Glenn, you and Skousen argue that all the violence today, all the totalitarian, Nanny-State, repressive governmental stifling of basic human rights, religious and intellectual freedom, comes from the Left. In quaint, Hannity or Limbaugh-era terms: The Problem is Liberals you say. You point out example after example and grin smugly, laughing at anyone who doesn’t catch your brilliance—daring the world to challenge your empirical masterwork. But you’ve missed a pretty obvious point Glenn.

Those officious shitebites you keep indicting aren’t Liberals. There aren’t any Liberals any more. Chairman Mao said: sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. Well, it has. They fought the Establishment, they beat the Establishment, and now they ARE the Establishment. They rocked the vote, and now they’re not going to rock the boat, and they won’t let you rock it either. What was radical, revolutionary, and represented the product of allowing period “Liberals” to think freely and explore alternatives to the existing political and social structure, has now been codified, canonized, carved in stone and will be just as vigorously beaten into the captive citizenry as any other retrograde, reactionary, Conservative movement. Opposing ideologies will be eliminated with extreme prejudice.

The guys who politically rescued Mormonism in spite of itself in the early days were Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Whigs and Republicans just wanted to wipe Mormons out. The only totalitarian regime ever to infiltrate and rule in this great land was the Puritan government at Plymouth Colony. America’s Children of the archetypal ruling Christian bastard, John Calvin, made the Taliban look like amateurs.

Willard Cleon Skousen had it all arse-backwards. Don’t follow this buffoon’s intellectual dyslexia ‘round and ‘round until your powers of reason disappear into your own arsehole as well.

If you won’t believe me, if you won’t believe Joseph Smith, perhaps you’ll believe James Madison:

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries. [James Madison, 1803 Letter objecting to use of state land for churches.]

Now, I led with that statement because it sums up my point so well. However, it’s become fashionable these days by “Christian Nation” zealots to claim this quote is not actually one of Madison’s. It has been long attributed to him but its provenance is a bit murky or so they now claim. Whoever said it, it is perfectly phrased to express what Madison would no doubt have said himself. I imagine that because it so perfectly also discredits the Holy Conspiracy’s claim that the Founding Fathers never really meant to build what Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church and State, it would be handy for them if he hadn’t said it. I wonder however, why the Holy Conspiracy is so exercised to disprove the validity of this sentiment, when Madison clearly says essentially the same thing repeatedly in a host of other absolutely unquestionable documents:

During almost fifteen centuries, has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution….

–Page 106, Christianity and the Constitution.

Nothwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov’ & Religion neither can be duly supported…. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov’ will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together; [James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt]

The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. [James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, Dec 3, 1821]

We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. [James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Assemby of Virginia]

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. [James Madison, 1819, in Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State]

http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_JMadison.htm

http://ramonasentinel.com/article/Commentary/Commentary/Separation_of_church_and_state_intended/1844’

Or as George Washington said in 1796 in signing the Treaty of Tripoli:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” [Emphasis mine.]

Click here to see the actual article 11 of the Treaty

http://nobeliefs.com/Tripoli.htm

Every single Christian Nation eventually rises from it’s own repeatedly brutal self-extermination attempts saying, well, that’s all behind us now, we’ve finally fixed the religion—and then evolves into the same violently repressive culture yet again. Over and over. That is not Our Father in Heaven’s plan for America.

What Cleon Skousen missed, what you’re missing now Glenn Beck, is that the 5000 Year Leap made by the Founding Fathers in 1776, was deliberately and carefully aimed as far from the direction of a Christian Nation as they  could launch themselves. Now you and your Holy Conspirators want to jump back into the Christian historical pit of darkness. Enlightenment came to America in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

That’s the great Bait-and-Switch ploy you aren’t seeing Brother Beck.

That’s the Christian Cycle Glenn.

That’s Satan’s Plan.

Satan’s Plan.

Glenn.

Glenn Beck Part 3: ET Phone Home—Skousen Left a Callback

Glenn, Glenn, why persecuteth thou me?

Glenn, why do you weep out your passionate faith in Divine Providence when you have clearly set yourself about to thwart it? The God you claim to worship has struggled to make His will known through two-thousand years of faithful but incompetent imbeciles and spiritual jackasses of great loyalty but no common sense. The so-called “Christian” world has repressed, oppressed, hacked, tortured, excommunicated and annihilated itself back and forth with no sense of God at all, much less an understanding of the human condition and the physical universe. Through the generational writhings of this anti-intellectual, spiritual, social, and political cyclone of selfish, ignorant, human opinionating, the Great Architect of the Universe finally brought together just the right handful of truly enlightened souls, on the right continent, at the right time, and in the right circumstances, to help mankind write God’s pure will into human law. God overcame centuries of narrow-minded, dogmatic so-called “Christian” bigots and bullies, craftily slid past the Christian dumb-asses at the Constitutional Convention, and gave us the Divinely Inspired Constitution of the United States of America.

The Constitution guarantees all of God’s children what Mormons call, “Free Agency.” The Agency of Man is not a Christian concept. Free will is an illusion in Christian theology. Man can either be God’s agent or the devil’s agent. Man has no agency of his own in Christianity. No man is innocent until proven guilty, all men are born guilty and worthy only of death and hell. Unless they are “saved” and “born again” into the family of Christ, they are tools of the devil and have no part in a Christian Nation.

It really is that simple Glenn.

I’ve heard you stammering incredulously over it with Christian callers on the radio Glenn: No, Christians do not believe we are all God’s children. You certainly aren’t one as a Mormon. That’s Christian theology. If you don’t even know that simple Christian precept you are truly a religious and intellectual toddler. You know just enough to be a danger to yourself and others-particularly to the church you claim to love. You can Bible-bash Christians all you want trying to sell your universal Mormon brotherhood of all mankind, but you’ll read it your way and they’ll just read it their way. Christians don’t actually read the Bible anyway, they just try to reconcile it against two-thousand years of Christian tradition. That’s why you can’t grin like some religious simpleton, and gleefully just round-up people of good character who fear God, link arms, and celebrate the Constitution as if we’re all brothers and sisters. That you believe it to be so, or that it is ultimately true, makes no difference to your Christian pals who haven’t allowed anyone making that claim walk out of the debate alive for almost two millennia.

Christians actually have no respect for the Constitution at all except insofar as it gives them what they imagine to be a right to ascendency over all other citizens. A lot of Christians for example, dug in at the Constitutional Convention to maintain that the Bible approves of slavery and thus their right to own human chattel had to be sustained by the Constitution as well. That wholly Christian argument took God another several American generations and hundreds of thousands of good Christian fatalities and brutal maimings on both sides of a bloody civil war to wipe clean the shite-sized smear the Christian Constitutional delegates insistently excreted onto the Sainted fabric of the Holy American Constitution.

The single, uniquely Christian contribution to the Constitution is slavery.

Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America. That’s as simple as I can make it for you Glenn. Christians want to “restore” the Constitution to their “Original Argument,” the one that puts Christians back in charge of the nation and allows them to rule directly out of the Bible just like Calvin did. Just like the Pilgrims did at Plymouth. The Constitution American Christians condescend to live under today was surreptitiously foisted upon them in 1787. It eventually allowed non-Christians to “take over.” Just like the Mormons did in Missouri and Illinois—simply by being allowed to vote Christians out of power so ‘non-Christians” could run their own lives. That’s what Christianity wants to “correct.” Christianity wants back the right to run your life for you Glenn. And it won’t be pretty for you if they get their way.

The legal code adopted in 1641 as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, reads as follows:

58. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to see the peace, ordinances and rule of Christ observed in every church according to his word. So it be done in a civill and not in an Ecclesiastical way.

59. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to deale with any Church member in a way of Civill Justice, notwithstanding any Church relation, offic or interest.

60. No church censure shall degrad or depose any man from any Civill dignitie, office, or Authoritie he shall have in commonwealth.

94. 1. If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.

2. If any man or woman be a witch, (that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit), They shall be put to death.

3. If any man shall Blaspheme the name of god, the father, Sonne, or Holie ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptous or high handed blasphemie, or shall curse god in the like manner he shall be put to death….

Page 33, Christianity and the Constitution, 1987, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids MI 49506

Christianity is lying to you Glenn. What Christianity really wants, as clearly exposed in Puritan legal code, is to give civil officers all power and authority to administer Church affairs and administer Church punishments. Your revisionist Christian Nation “historians” phrase it in a way that only points out that the Church is not allowed to enforce its will upon the citizenry. What they don’t point out is that in a Christian Nation, the civil government is given all power to do just that—the State in this Puritan, “Christian America” is empowered to interpret, enact, rule upon, and enforce, Christian, Biblical law, even over, above, or against the persons of or objections of Church officers. The Puritans had no concept of a pluralistic society or religious liberty. They just democratized religious oppression.

Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, the “founders” of Mormonism were born into an ancient Christian tradition that every single one of them found backward, lacking in insight, and filled with reprehensible notions that they believed arose out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic nature of God and mankind’s relationship to Him. Long before Joseph Smith claimed to be seeing Heavenly visions and collaborating with Angelic visitors, his entire family was actively seeking more enlightened answers to questions they believed Christianity had been getting wrong for generations. They pondered these questions however, as mainstream Christians. They were familiar with the jargon, the history, the many failings, the irrational dogma of the Christian world. The Founding Fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America found themselves in the same condition.

When I refer to the “Founding Fathers,” I refer almost exclusively to those authors and delegates who had controlling input into the crafting of the Constitution itself. What the others thought is nearly irrelevant.Their ideas got redacted out of the nation. So, yes, a lot of “Christians” had input into the document. It was a document designed to rule a national majority of Christians. You could even say it arose out of a Christian environment. But its authors very specifically eliminated the several central and utterly fatal Christian theological and ideological concepts that had self-destructed every single authoritatively Christian government that had ever existed before. They repeatedly cited clear examples of the failures of Christian governments, and every bit as clearly argued against forming just another one like them.

The Founding Fathers believed, as did Joseph Smith, that it was Christian theology itself that inevitably turned on its governed masses, only to torment and destroy them.

Divine Providence, therefore, was working against the founding of a Christian Nation, not for it.

My dearest Brother Beck:

I come to minister, not to be ministered unto. I cannot help you if you will not first admit you have a problem. But I shall do my best Brother Beck, to teach you correct principles in spite of yourself, and in spite of the corrupting influence of your new Mormon conspiratorial-world-view-messiah,  Willard Cleon Skousen. To do so I must risk seriously pissing off a couple of generations of sometimes high-ranking “Mormons” who once, or now still, have chosen to indulge Skousen’s uniquely “Mormon” but generally preposterous, political paranoia.

Glenn, you and your Skousenite compatriots have studied the words of the Founding Fathers as Mormons. Unlike the Founding Fathers or their political contemporaries like Smith, Young, Taylor, Roberts and the early Mormon deep-thinkers, you, Skousen, and his Wasatch Front benefactors of whatever Mormon rank, are the product of generations of theological, social and political inbreeding in an isolated valley, in the center of a great empty basin, as far from The United States of America as you all could get at the time. You translate Christian Enlightenment vernacular into Mormonese. You think Mormons are Christians. You think the stuff the Founding Fathers wrote into American canon therefore sounds like Christianity. This is because you are idiots. Simply put, you are ignorant. Your failed perspective has made the history and intentions of the Founding Fathers come out all wrong in your provincial Mormon heads.

Accept this in the spirit of love in which it is offered. If it enrages you enough to think about the possibility of your error, at least I will have done my job here. This is how the world sees you–this is the confused pondering you force every human on the planet to struggle through in order to even begin to understand what “Mormonism” is supposed to be all about. You are incapable of seeing it from where you hunker comfortably down there in your safe, cosey little valley. You have no insight or any sense of natural cynicism out of which you might even ever self-enlighten enough to pose the question that would advance the cause of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like a 5000 Year Leap. And this is the question:  Is it worth it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the world has to first embrace the impassioned peripheral ranting and ramblings of the likes of Glenn Beck and Cleon Skousen, to gain access our the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

The Constitution, the writings of the Founding Fathers, to an educated, intelligent person, actually sound like the conscientious, orderly work of Liberal, Enlightened Christians, Deists, Universalists, Masons, and Free Thinkers. That’s because they were. We can easily read these same heretical charges being spiritedly hurled against the authors of the Constitution from the “Orthodox” Christians of their day who vehemently opposed most of their best ideas.

The Founding Fathers sounded like Mormons. The Founding Fathers sounded like Joseph Smith when he talked about society and politics, and even religion to some extent. You and Cleon are right about that Glenn. That doesn’t make the Constitution Christian at all. It makes the Constitution about as far from “Orthodox” or “Historical” Christianity as those authoring it could make it, as they vigorously tried to shield its sacred prose from the fatal Christian pretexts that run-of-the-mill Presbyterians, Methodist, Baptists, Catholics, and other conventional “Christians” on the panel were trying to wedge between its hallowed lines.

Organized, “Historical” Christianity you must understand, is nothing whatsoever to do with anything Jesus ever had to say. Brother Glenn, all you happy ecumenical guys in your mystical Beckland think you can join hands in prayer for the nation, you think you can slap each other on the back like you’re even talking the same language, but you have nothing politically or theologically in common with most of your new “friends.” You imagine it’s all about being a good person, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.

Dr. A.H. Barton, of the “Christian Jew Hour,” a national radio program once said:

“If all you’ve got is the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments, you’ve got nothing.”

For the benefit of the non-Christians and non-Mormons having a read, I’ll simply say that as fecked up as you think Mormonism might be, it’s never been as fecked up as this thing the world knows as “Christianity.” Joseph Smith’s message from God to Christianity in common terms was, you’re all fecked up. Even if you mean well, you’re still totally off the mark. Joseph Smith’s “restored” Gospel contrary to your apparent understanding, was in its day a radically Liberal one, and that’s why the Conservative Christian Establishment killed him. That’s what totalitarian “Christian” societies have always done to those who criticize them.

Joseph Smith preached a Gospel of moderation in all things. Friend Glenn, what you’re doing is nothing close to “moderate.” It’s frigging frenetic in it’s un-moderation. Christianity has not been inherently moderate at all through the ages. You’re just a case in point that proves me out. You’re assembling your own socio-political-religious nuclear reactor and nobody apparently told you about installing control rods—because you clearly don’t have any working for you. Nimrods yes, but no control rods.

Joseph Smith’s first official statement of faith was the “Wentworth Letter,” posted in a newspaper to explain basic Mormon beliefs. Mormons now call this “The 13 Articles of Faith.” The Articles pertinent to this treatise are:

10 We believe in the literal ^agathering of Israel and in the restoration of the ^bTen Tribes; that ^cZion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will ^deign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be ^erenewed and receive its ^fparadisiacal ^gglory.

11 We claim the ^aprivilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the ^bdictates of our own ^cconscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them ^dworship how, where, or what they may.

12 We believe in being ^asubject to ^bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in ^cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the ^dlaw.

http://lds.org/scriptures/pgp/a-of-f/1.13?lang=eng

Glenn, you may want to refer back to these now and again, because this is Mormon canon.

Yes, we as Mormons believe a lot of Biblical stuff will be going on in Israel and the US in the Last Days. I know that’s one of your main fixations, but nobody is saying these days are them. Only you Glenn. And yes, we believe the Constitution is Divinely inspired, exactly as it is, warts and all. It can be fixed and polished as we go. That’s built into the document itself. But contrary to your implied belief, we do believe in supporting mortal governments as mortals, by mortals, for mortals. If Jesus is coming back to run the show He doesn’t need you or me to steal His thunder. He will let us know. He will let everyone know. Until then, feck off with the Armageddon talk Glenn. You missed the boat on that whole Mormon Survivalist Era. Stop trying to drag its sunken hulk back into port and re-float it. The Brethren aren’t even talking a “year’s supply” any more. It’s down to a 72 hour pack for emergency use. That’s just common sense, not preparing for imminent destruction of the universe. When the president of the church announces it’s time to pack up and move to Adam Ondi Ahman, then let’s all get excited. Till then chill out brother. Chill.

Joseph Smith also agreed with his political John the Baptist, Thomas Jefferson:

…It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Brother Beck…Glenn, your entire fanaticism is driven by apocryphal bullshite from sources outside the LDS canon. You’re doing what I call: crapping on my religion. Most Mormons have the luxury of crapping all over my religion with their spooky Utah folk magic and pseudo-intellectual Pioneer Hillbilly gobbledygook in the privacy of the Wasatch Front where the non-Mormon population just rolls its eyes and ignores the silliness. Not so with you Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the Osmond Family of Apocalyptic Paranoia. Glenn Beck is crapping on my religion in front of an international fan base and a much larger growing base of hostile critics of Mormonism anyway, who’s rapiers of easy ridicule you sharpen daily.

I beg forgiveness for you Glenn. I beg pardon from God and mankind both. Glenn Beck is not what Mormonism is about. Cleon Skousen is not what Mormonism is all about, and a prophet of God made that an official declaration in 1979. Has nobody given you the message yet? I know in 1979 you were a stoned alcoholic, but sober up brother. Wake up and smell the 21st century. Mormonism is goofy, but not that goofy. Dangerously goofy.

Glenn, nothing personal, but have you ever wondered why God is striking you blind? What if every time you read a Cleon Skousen passage the ungodliness of it burns away just a little bit more of your sight? Do you need to be struck dumb as well before you get the message? Mormonism is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The Constitution is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The gaggle of evangelical Christian zealots you’re assembling to “save” the Constitution only mean to “save” it from the non-Christians. Like you. They do not believe in Free Agency. They do not believe in an open pluralistic society–with the possible exception of tolerating the least offensive non-Christians as second-class citizens just out of charity. They’re only just enlightened enough to not try to achieve their goals through genocidal Crusades any more. Instead, they’re happy to employ the services of grandiose, self-deluded Quislings like you to reverse all the gains won by our Founding Fathers, and restore America to the Puritan Hellhole of Calvin’s Geneva.

Glenn, you may recall that Satan’s plan in Mormonism, is defined as the denial of choice. Free Agency is the ultimate right of all intelligent beings in Mormon theology. Man can choose to be good or bad. Man is also free to be neither and just waste his time. In Mormon theology, man is not inherently evil, but has won a place on this earth, to experience this learning laboratory, by already proving he has chosen to do good in a previous spiritual existence. That leaves us with stupid. Man is not born evil, man is born stupid. That means you too Glenn.

Because man is stupid and prone to imperfections and mistakes, and because in the presence of a Perfect God no mistakes can be tolerated, God created a lesser, physical reality in which man is free to manipulate objects, influence or lobby or organize his fellow beings, and debate concepts freely, without pissing off God because of man’s natural idiocy, constant screw-ups, generally annoying behavior, and bad judgment. In order for there to be choice however, there must be opposing choices, differing arguments, from which man can chose. So, back to Satan for that.

When this Divine program to advance our immature spiritual selves into a more godly mankind was presented to us all, Mormons believe Satan claimed he could bring all of us back to our Father in Heaven intact, having reached our highest potential with absolute certainty. He made this boast on two conditions: one, he had to have all the power and glory and get all the credit, and two, he needed to force us to do the right thing all the time. Well, God the Father, or Eloheim, said Lucifer’s plan sort of misses the point. Jesus, or Jehovah, said He’d be God’s humble agent, become our physical Creator, God the Father could have all the glory, and Jesus would take responsibility for the sin and error and evil that necessitated out of said Creation, because human failure was integral to allowing mankind the opportunity to grow. As the Creator, Jesus accepts upon Himself the sins of all mankind, and pays our debt to the Father so we might return to Him.

Contrary to popular belief, Mormons believe Jesus got the gig.

Stick with me Glenn, because this is hard doctrine, central, never been messed with, never been contested Mormon theology. You’ll find it in all the training manuals with the Correlation Committee’s stamp of approval. Not like the turd-filled tangential volumes you’ve apparently been perusing. And even just this introductory bit here Glenn, it ain’t Christianity. It’s absolutely foreign to Christianity. They killed Joseph Smith and attempted to annihilate his whole church for teaching it. In Mormonism, God guarantees you the right to choose your own path without either He or Satan compelling or threatening you with hell and damnation or bribing you with a cheap Grace salvation. That wouldn’t be a choice. That would be coercion. That would be Christianity.

The devil in Mormonism, is generally capable only of tempting man with the most subtle, spiritual or intellectual promptings. And man has to be a willing promptee. The devil can only get his way by working on mankind with these ephemeral urgings until man gives in, embraces the idea, and physically acts upon it. In Mormonism, Satan has no body, no authority, no power, and never will, and this mortal period is the only avenue of influence upon mankind or the physical universe he will ever have. In Mormonism, Satan won’t even inherit hell and rule over the damned—Cain gets that post, Cain has a body, made the first cut, served his time on earth, and though he screwed up his mortal chance at eternal glory, he still ranks over Satan, and as the first murderer and inventor of the concept of destroying others to get personal gain, Cain will receive a resurrected body as we all will, only to inherit the job of Evil Overlord of the Eternally Damned. According to Mormon theology, Satan rejected earth life in a big war over the salvation plan in Heaven, where Satan and a third of the Heavenly Host got kicked out of God’s program entirely. So, this earthly span we now enjoy is the devil’s only time to shine.

Satan claimed however, with this tiny bit of power over mankind, he’d rule the world. Now, that only works if you give Satan credit for it. If you don’t buy his boast, nothing happens. Satan can’t physically come after you. In fact Satan blowing his own horn until he appears to be invincible to mankind is one of his first manipulative tricks. Appearing as an Angel of Light is another. Glenn Beck should know that. His new favorite political prophet and insipid Mormon author had Lucifer as a ghost writer.

Lucifer’s greatest ploy is not the half-truth as is often claimed, but the just about a third share of truth. That means you’re eating the devil’s shite at a 2-1 ratio, about as high a level as he can shove that crap down your throat without you noticing it. And Glenn Beck buddy, you take your Satanic Shite with milk and cookies, so you just don’t have a clue what all you’re eating along with the yummy stuff.

Is the devil’s goal to lead you down to hell? No. That’s not even statistically possible, since in Mormonism, only a tiny minority of humanity ever gets sent to “Outer Darkness,” a rough equivalent of hell or damnation, where not Satan rules, but Cain, and only those who deny the Holy Ghost ever get to see what it’s like. All other sins are pardonable, and Christ doesn’t close the door on accepting Him as Savior when you snuff it. Mormons believe in universal physical salvation. Everybody gets resurrected. Everybody gets judged, and nearly all of us are going on to some sort of reward. Earth life itself is already a reward. And yes, if you never stumbled into Him on earth, you still can accept Christ as your Lord and Master beyond the veil and do OK for yourself.

Christianity believes that Satan was literally handed this world after Adam and Even fell. Christians believe our Father in Heaven went off in a huff and turned the universe or at least our little piece of it over to the Adversary. In Christianity, Satan is the god of this earth. Satan is the spiritual Father of all mankind. Satan is the defacto Creator of our corrupted human flesh through a devilish and filthy biological act. Nature’s God is Satan in Christian theology. Anything natural, anything man creates, including human offspring, is for the glory and posession of Satan and unworthy of God’s Majesty. Every living thing, animal or vegetable, the very stone and earth we walk upon, every egg, every sperm, is Satanically corrupted, and every fetus in the womb is heir to damnation. Now, I submit that by internalizing this fundamentally bleak and desperate world-view as its core belief, anything Jesus of Nazareth had to say about being nice to each other has little effect in most cases. Christianity finds itself making bleak and desperately opressive internal laws and then consistently rallies its forces to vigorously and violently export these laws in greater and greater circles of oppression. Why? It’s simple, even if you credit Christians with good intentions, they really believe you are going to suffer eternal torment if they do not convince, or force you to join them. And likewise, they really do believe that if you are not one of them, you are an agent of hell on earth and a danger to good rule and society.

In rather an opposite take on the matter, Mormons believe mortality is a gift from our Creator where we can learn, grow, know joy, and appreciate the sweet by tasting of the bitter—not grovel before an arbitrary God who slapped us together one weekend with some spit and clay while on an inexplicable and mysterious Creative Lark, where we’re damned from the get-go, where God randomly elects to send most of us to hell but decides to save a few of us for Himself according to His whims. Satan has no power to change this program. Indeed, like the Flood, or Sodom and Gomorrah, any time the world or a culture reaches the point where Satan has gained so much influence over mankind that mortal existence is no longer a fair and reasonable test bed for learning wrong from right, God cleans the slate and starts over. Thus, in spite of the devil’s best efforts, future generations continue to have the same opportunity to chose their own way in life.

Now, Glenn, on this latter point I think you may be getting far too anxious.

The Obama Administration is not by far the most decadent and ungodly society ever to disgrace the planet. Not until the US president is hosting gala orgies of sex and carnage, where conquered slave women are being raped to death by donkeys in public sports facilities should you start spouting that level of hyperbole. (Though in your younger days Glenn, I bet that just describes a typical weekend outing to Mexico.) The world has been in far worse shape brother. Far worse. We were able to choose our own destiny before Obama, and we will be able to choose our own destiny after Obama. It’s routine American politics baby. If I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure God will actively purify America all on His own as He has done before. It’s His job. Not yours Glenn. Not the job of the John Birch Society, Willy Skousen, or GBTV.

No, It’s the devil’s main goal in Mormon theology, to simply feck around and generally distress humanity as much as he can with while he still has a chance. And Glenn, he’s fecking with you. He’s having a ball. It’s the only fun he’s ever going to get. He knows he’s not going to bind many of us in chains—we already told him to piss off in a previous spiritual go-‘round. We all stood with Christ in pre-mortal battle against the forces of darkness just to get here. All Satan can do here and now is try to show God what a stupid idea that Free Agency thing is while he’s got a rightful place in the earthly arena. Who knows Brother Beck? You may indeed have a bona-fide call from God—but that just means the devil is going to make an extra effort to feck it up. He seems to be doing a good job of it so far.

Satan, the former light-bearing “Lucifer,” got the job of “Accuser of the Saints.” He got it because he’s the ultimate prick. That’s Satan. That’s who he is, what he does, and how he works. And he’s pricking you Glenn Beck.

Prick. Prick. Prick.

When Satan comes to destroy your soul and drag you down to hell, he seldom comes sporting horns, a pitch-fork and a pointy tail. Usually he comes wearing a pretty dress and singing a sweet song, looking something like Marie Osmond. I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. And other times he comes looking like your friendly old uncle Cleon with a kindly smile and a comically oversized nose.

Which brings me in earnest to Willard Cleon AKA “Klingon” Skousen. Skousen might well be the penultimate devilish prick. God help us. Why in heaven’s name Glenn, Brother Beck Sir, did you decide to dredge this inane fossil’s handiwork out of the literary dustbin? Why do you weep so profoundly at the scribblings of this half-demented, discredited, disowned Mormon political heretic? What demonic little elf sat on your shoulder and whispered: Let’s have another go at this crazy bastard…! Come on! Just roll this Skousen lunacy right in with your simpering, Chicken Little-prophetic-panic-attacks and you’ll pick up a whole new audience just waiting for a place to vent their pent-up, world-hating xenophobia…

Klingon Skousen is to Mormonism what that other insufferable prick Jean Cauvin is to Christianity. Only the combined life and works of Willy Skousen can rival the inexplicable Mormon participation in the slaughter of the Fancher party at Mountain Meadows for the shame and recrimination it has dumped upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even Skousen’s one-time comrade in Commie-hunting, Ezra Taft “ET” Benson, who boostered Skousen and his John Birch buddies in the early days of the Red Scare, got very silent about the whole topic by the time he became LDS church president, and fully sustained Spencer W Kimball’s official 1979 disassociation of the LDS church with anything or anyone Skousenite.

Both Benson and Skousen got the nicknames I’m using from a large portion of the Mormon faithful who thought these two had just wandered into the planet from outer space when they first started openly talking conspiratorial politics in John Bircheese at formal LDS religious venues.

Cleon Skousen passed away in 2006 at the age of 93. In his last years he was something of a pariah, though he’d been bolstered in his career as this last era’s preeminent LDS BS merchant by two or three high-ranking pals in church leadership. One of them, Thomas S Monson, current LDS president claimed at his funeral service:

“Everyone he spoke to, everyone he taught, is closer to Christ than before they met Cleon Skousen.”

http://www.ldsliberty.org/an-open-letter-to-detractors-of-w-cleon-skousen-and-his-works/

I would counter this by saying it is exactly the warm commentary expected from an old friend who dates back to an era where a lot of would-be LDS church theology was cobbled together by unofficial guesswork in a convoluted jumble of speculation and extrapolation by a bunch of intermountain goobers generations away from any original or authoritative sources, through a process that amounted to just sitting around the general store with a hayseed in your mouth and kicking wild-arsed ideas around. I’m sure Willard Skousen was a gentle, friendly guy who argued his case humbly and calmly. They said the same thing about John Calvin—until you crossed him. Then he tended to haul you into a show-trial, declared you either a traitor or a heretic–it amounted to the same thing–pronounced you invariably guilty, and then preferred to cut off your head. If you really annoyed him, he took your life’s work, used it to light a bonfire, and chained you up on a post next to it and slowly roasted you to death in a public square over the course of hours, so your friends and neighbors can all smell your slowly burning flesh and hear your agonizing screams while you beg for mercy, as an example of why you shouldn’t argue with John Calvin.

I would further suggest that for every person who talked to Cleon Skousen that found him helpful in building a testimony of Christ, a good ten or more were instantly repulsed and concluded that if accepting Willard Klingon Skousen as an inspired prophet of God, and Donny Osmond as a musical genius is required by Jesus Christ for salvation, then hell looks pretty good by comparison. And worse yet, Skousen multiplied his political and intellectually repulsive capabilities exponentially with every new convert he recruited to his paranoid cult of personality, and through every insanely conspiratorial political or “historical” book he published with implied approval of “The Brethren.” Skousen’s underground Mormon network of xenophobes spread the paranoid dread of unknown conspirators like Amway’s pyramid scheme foisted over-priced household products on the nation, till soon everyone had a garage full of the stuff. And oddly enough, it was all the same people.

As Donny Osmond did not recruit “Mormons,” but rather “Osmondos,” so too did Cleon Skousen never bring a single Latter-day Saint into the church, he only ever converted earnest seekers of Jesus Christ into “Skousenites.”

I would submit that Cleon Skousen was the single most divisive character in Mormon history. Having absolutely no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever, Cleon Skousen alienated more otherwise worthy segments of the national and world populations, from even exploring Jesus Christ and His Restored Church, for purely political and philosophical reasons, than any secret, Satanic, Communist conspiracy could have ever schemed to deter from baptism, or a thousand Whores of Babylon could have ever hoped to lead away from God’s light through carnal, sensual and devilish charms.

The real truth is, the John Birch Society that Cleon Skousen and his benefactors in the LDS hierarchy so loved was actually started by KGB sleeper agent and dynastically-wealthy, multi-national grape juice magnate Robert Welch in 1958, to serve as a disinformation bureau that would ultimately discredit the American Conservative Movement by depicting it as the integral product of a fanatical core of self-destructive paranoid schizophrenics. Russia was also confident that once American Christian patriots had been infected with this seed of xenophobia, they would quickly duplicate the hysteria that resulted in most of the town being prosecuted or executed as witches, in colonial Salem. The Kremlin first got the idea from the histrionic self-nobbling antics of Senator Eugene McCarthy a few years earlier. By the end of his delusional episode, McCarthy was so unpopular, and the anti-Communist movement was so humiliated by his example, that the KGB insisted that though it would take a convincingly Capitalistic stooge like Welch and a little prodding, they would still find many willing dupes in the US, eager to take up the cause of paranoia, and continue the job of negating any legitimate American Conservative agenda. Soviet think-tanks felt by this means the very heart of American politics could be rendered divided and the citizenry made mistrustful of both fellow Americans and the government itself. The probable outcome of this effort, the Soviet project heads maintained, would be that America would gradually grow more and more politically and socially crippled, indecisive, and directionless. On the world stage, the formerly All-Powerful United States of America would become totally ineffectual due to its incessant internal in-fighting and radically opposed idealogical and political partisanship.

Cleon Skousen was a sometime professor at BYU, from 1951-55, to 1967-1978. That’s his only claim to any authority at all. For the record, the preceding paragraph is total BS, but it’s as authoritative as anything Cleon Skousen ever wrote. It’s just a matter of finding patrons who are willing to believe it. After that, it’s all about peer pressure.

I ran into my first batch of Skousenites as a student at BYU while Cleon was in his last two years there. They’re still fumigating the Religion Department of his stink, and they can’t burn his political books fast enough to keep them from resurfacing on campus—thanks to Glenn fecking Beck. Glenn, pal, don’t you know you’re riding the crest of a wave that crashed all it’s most gnarly surfers against the hot red walls of Zion’s Canyon in about 1985 and left them flopping there on the ground, stunned and unable to save themselves from their own stupidity. They’re all still hiding there waiting for the mushroom clouds. And then along came Glenn Beck…

Thanks Glenn.

At least the fallen LDS apostle, the late Paul Dunn confined his fairy-tales to heroic fantasies about his imaginary baseball career on teams he never played with. Dunn’s books were swiftly purged from LDS libraries when he was essentially given a permanent suspension of duties for telling tall tales to missionaries about his pitching exploits. (Faith promoting lies yes…but harmless mostly.) Unlike the ignominious, permanent disappearance of Dunn, Glenn Beck now resurrects the damaged Cleon Skousen, everyone’s favorite long dead and irrelevant, schizophrenic Mormon hack, and elevates his once-cultic revisionist Christian classic to Best-Seller status overnight. Beck’s a late-coming player in a game of 8-ball that was essentially over in the Mormon church a generation ago. The question to ponder, is whether Beck is a mark or whether he’s actually the hustler. If the latter is true, then he’s got a lot in common with Cleon Skousen.

Skousen’s strictly religious contributions to Mormonism are too sophomoric to go into at length. Only the fact that the rank-and-file Mormon is such a bewildered and ignorant student of any religion at all, Christianity, world faiths, or even their own, explains why any Mormon would be fascinated by the circuitous ponderings of Klingon Skousen. Some of his postulates include the speculation that the co-eternal spirits (us) who lived with God in the pre-mortal existence, could have voted God out of His position—that God would cease to be God if we stopped supporting Him.

Skousenites routinely sat around in their little BYU think tanks or priesthood quorums worldwide, claiming the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus via cloning, or that Jesus was incapable of dying unless He wanted to because he was a self-healing, alien-human hybrid. (God-human hybrid at least.) They occupied themselves pondering the most obtuse claimed “historical” propositions of ancient Mormon leaders out of private period journals or those records popularly attributed to Brigham Young, Joseph Smith or other early leaders, like the enigmatic assertion that Adam was born “of an earth, but not this earth.” When they finally cloned Dolly the famous Scottish Sheep and lab experiment, they went off on a cloning theory binge. They pretended to have “proven” the Virgin Birth via cloning. When they found out cloning only produced females from females, well, that was already one theory floating around John Birch circles anyway. Mormons however, went on to artificial insemination via beaming Divine DNA directly inside Mary’s womb as a better explanation. Skousen and his disciples spread this entire concept of digging out “higher truths” from students and missionaries to stakes and missions and converts all over the globe via his active political and religious fan base.

This is weird shite even for Utah Mormons. It’s flipping blasphemy. The notion that we even need to investigate and understand all the fine points of Celestial reproduction is spiritual pornography. Even his authoritative friend ET Benson said so quietly, as president of the church. Suffice it to say, none of Skousen’s works, none of his theories have ever been endorsed by LDS authority nor advanced into official instructional or commentary materials. More obviously, Skousen was never called to any significant church ecclesiastical office even in his brightest days. But you see, nobody wants to shut down kindly old Brother Cleon, and you know some of his theories sound pretty OK, so you have to give him credit for what he got right don’t you?

That’s how Satan works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYvgplF0LUI

http://lehislibrary.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/cleon-skousens-intelligence-theory-of-atonement/

http://reperiendi.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/the-atonement-by-cleon-skousen/

To be blunt, the Skousen era at BYU, and the Church Educational System and Seminary programs that he contaminated in the process, were an embarrassment to future generations. My wife, who was born and raised in Salt Lake, recalls one BYU religion professor proposing that the “earth had wings” and the ten lost tribes were out living on these “wings.” No. I am not kidding. Other BYU Skousen-era conjectures deduced that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene, and the wedding He attended in Cana where He performed His first miracles was His own. It was further proposed that Christ had more than one wife, and most likely children. You can just watch The DaVinci Code for the rest. That’s the sort of crap Skousenites thought about all the time. Although I personally know it to be shite, my point is not whether any of this may or may not be correct. The point is it’s pointless. Why even go there then?

It’s hard enough to sell Golden Plates, cabin-going Angels, a non-Trinitarian Godhead and Joseph Smith translating ancient papyrus he bought from a travelling peddler through a shiny rock in the bottom of a hat. Why add yet another layer of improbable-sounding, entirely apocryphal Utah-Mormon pioneer folklore between the core of the faith and the potential convert? It’s plenty entertaining for the bored-arsed Valley Mormons who are forced to sit through one, two, three hours of the same damned meeting discussing the same damned stuff every other day of the week. Yeah, you gotta have something “new” to talk about eventually. But it’s counter-productive as hell in a missionary sense.

I do have to confess that some of Skousen’s political ideology I find fairly sound and productive on its face. But I could also say that Adolph Hitler restored the German economy, built the autobahn, made the trains run on time and designed some pretty snappy outfits. That whole taking over Europe and killing off all the Jews and genetically inferior races thing, well, maybe that went too far. But generally, Hitler had some good ideas about nation building. Likewise, even if 90% of Skousen’s masterwork, The 5000 Year Leap for instance, is reasonable theory, it’s still the 10% of his most central elements that are totally evil that negate anything else he has to say. To wit: Brother Skousen, America is not a Christian Nation, and the Constitution was not pulled out of the Bible’s arse. The Constitution is the work of truly enlightened men, not Christians.

And before you cry foul, Skousen and Adolph had a lot in common:

“The Naked Capitalist” [one of Skousen’s political masterpieces allegedly based upon the work Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley] does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen. [Emphasis mine.}

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

http://www.salon.com/news/feat...

In-between his stints at BYU, Skousen served as police chief of Salt Lake City. He ultimately got sacked from the post in 1960 by a very Conservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, who called him “an incipient Hitler” who “ran the [SLC] police department like the Gestapo. Lee also called him an outright liar:

“Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in Alberta, Canada. He also had relatives in Juarez Colony Mexico. Colonia Juarez, What you won’t note unless you’re one of the Utah boys, is that these are the two places polygamist Mormon families fleeing the Christian anti-polygamy Crusade in Utah escaped to after the takeover of the territory by Federal troops. They were both out of US jurisdiction. Frankly, those Mormon colonies were even more isolated and more culturally provincial and literally inbred than even the Utah Saints ended up being. And apparently they were so isolated from the reason for their isolation, that Cleon Skousen never understood that his people were banished to these outposts to escape the very Christian Nation he wrote about so glowingly in all of his books.

Skousen moved to California at age 10, grew up, served a Mormon mission in England and Ireland, went to junior college, moved to Washington DC to work in a New Deal farm agency, and then worked for the FBI, gaining a law degree while he was at it. Before his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Salt Lake City, his position at the FBI was little more than a middling file clerk without any particular clearance that would expose him to his oft-claimed “inside” Commie conspiracy information. The FBI in fact, in later years, maintained a file on him that grew to be two-thousand pages long and cited him as a danger to the nation and an encumbrance to the Bureau’s anti-Communist efforts. Ironically, once he hit Salt Lake City, he easily landed his job as police chief based on this FBI “experience,” and even after failing this police post spectacularly, he still parlayed his FBI “credentials” into an ultra-Right Wing anti-Communist empire, because the hard-core pious Mormon Conservative Zealots of Salt Lake City claimed he’d only been fired because he caught the mayor playing poker with some influential friends. Ah, the “insiders” took him down. Poor Willy.

A conspiracy nut is born.

Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file. “Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,” says Lazar.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

It was during his Calvin-like iron-fisted reign as police chief over Salt Lake City that Willy Skousen became a born-again anti-Communist. This was initially fueled by the McCarthy hearings, the efforts of the John Birch Society, and the resulting Red Menace panic that was extremely high in the quaint, provincial minds of the Utah Mormon community. It was in this period he wrote his first classic, The Naked Communist. He slipped LDS church president David O McKay a copy, which the latter wholeheartedly praised.

In 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he claimed that there were known communists working in the State Department. He went to Salt Lake City next. McCarthy was caught up in a media whirlwind that fanned the anti-communist flames. TheTydings committee was formed. The Democractic Majority that authored the Tydings report called McCarthy’s claims a “fraud and a hoax.” Some Republicans called the report treason.

Joseph McCarthy was dead by 1957, but McCarthyism lived on. Within Mormonism, Cleon Skousen was its hero.

…

Two other minor points of note. First, Ezra Taft Benson was the Mormon Prophet from 1985-1994.  He was named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943, and served in Eisenhower’s cabinet, with the permission of David O McKay. Ezra Taft Benson was a strong supporter of the John Birch Society. Second, “The Naked Communist” was first published by Publisher’s Press, which was then run by Thomas S. Monson, who is the Mormon Prophet today. (The Mormon conservative website mentions this here).

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon

Another pertinent note is that Monson published Skousen’s first book through his own private publishing firm because President Wilkinson of BYU had initially entertained the idea of having Skousen set up a panel to compose  a text on Communism for the school’s curriculum. Wilkinson scrapped the whole notion of incorporating any of Skousen’s Communist “expertise” into official BYU academic material when he saw what it actually looked like in print. Apparently Wilkinson had only humored Skousen’s fixation on the “Imminent World Communist Threat” on the recommendation of LDS church president David O McKay. Skousen’s own account of this is comically transparent—he headed a committee of actual scholars who had no interest in exploring his paranoid, conspiratorial babblings. They and Wilkinson eventually palmed the whole project off onto Skousen exclusively, who feverishly worked on it for two years out of their hair. Then Wilkinson blew off the finished product unceremoniously, saying his faculty wouldn’t support it—thus dodging any BYU affiliation with Skousen’s rabid, mad-dog Red-Baiting, while still having satisfied his chairman of the board, president McKay, that he had given it the “old college try.” Skousen completed The Naked Communist as a stand-alone work and in light of Wilkinson’s refusal and probably on the urging again of McKay, Skousen raised some funds for the presswork, Monson picked up the property and published it privately.

http://www.nothingwavering.org/post/16472/2009-11-16/cleon-skousen.html

In 1962 LDS General Conference, McKay recommended that members of the Church avail themselves of Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, declaring:

“I admonish everybody to read that excellent book of [former FBI agent and then-Salt Lake City Police] Chief Skousen’s.”

(David O. McKay, “Preach the Word,” Improvement Era, 62 [December 1959], p. 912, quoted in D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997], p. 82)

Given this sort of endorsement, Skousen became the darling of the Birch-hosted American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Skousen founded a group called the All-American Society, in addition to his other speaking efforts. Skousen accused all manner of top administration officials with treason and eventually incorporated most of the period government into his claims of Communist corruption. He claimed to have gained this insight from deep FBI contacts.

The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.”

…

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional [anti]communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

But you don’t have to believe me Glenn, because BYU once again now has been forced to deal with the stigma of Cleon the Klingon Skousen, thanks to you:

PROVO, Utah — Glenn Beck’s radio show draws roughly 8 million listeners a day.

W. Cleon Skousen gave nearly 15,000 lectures and wrote close to 40 books during his lifetime.

But just because those two, politically conservative LDS voices are some of the loudest, it doesn’t mean they speak for the entire conservative community, several BYU professors said during a panel discussion titled, “Glenn Beck, Cleon Skousen and LDS Conservatism.”

“One of the fallacies about our political culture is that we’ve allowed Cleon Skousen and those on the right to dominate LDS political writing and to suggest that that’s all there is,” said BYU political science professor Richard Davis, “even though that is clearly not the case.”

The discussion organized by BYU’s Tocqueville Project included three BYU professors and Paul Skousen, the son of the late, prolific political writer who was formerly best known for his best-selling book “The Naked Communist.”

However, Skousen has gained renewed interest since Fox News pundit Beck began touting Skousen’s book “The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Principles of Freedom 101.”
“It’s easy for me to see why (Beck) would have picked up on Cleon Skousen’s book and found it inspiring,” Davis said. “It fit in with his own performance.”

And that’s a lot of what Beck does — perform, the professors said.

“Most of the books of Beck’s I’ve picked up — are like his manic, ADHD television personality,” said BYU political science professor Ralph Hancock. “He’s just throwing stuff out there. They’re not meant to be read as discursive arguments. They’re just thrown out there to try to entertain people who would rather be Twittering or playing video games.”

Hancock said he agrees with some points made by Beck and Skousen but overall finds their arguments lacking in substance and scholarly research.

“I find in both a trace of anti-intellectualism,” Hancock said. “My interest is to help connect a certain LDS conservative impulse or mood with a more deeply grounded intellectual conservatism. We can’t enter the political field with the argument that all the bad, but smart people think X, but we good dumb people think Y.”

Hancock told students that if they are serious about conservatism, they, and he, need to “study diligently to increase our confidence that our intense feelings are common sense — and can be rationally articulated.”

Paul Skousen took the criticisms in stride and said his dad’s entire life was focused on studying and asking tough questions…. “He was trying to provoke people’s thinking,” he said. “Dad’s invitation was, ‘If someone can do better, please do, but until then, this is what I’ve been able to do.’”

Paul Skousen said his father knew Beck was pushing his book but only watched Beck’s show once or twice before he died.

“Were Dad here today, I think he would enjoy visiting with Glenn Beck,” Skousen said. “His counsel would be, ‘You got to give us some more answers.’”

Hancock offered several scholarly books where those answers could be found.

http://www.mormontimes.com/article/6690/BYU-profs-Glenn-Beck-doesnt-speak-for-all-Mormons

I guess you can see why BYU, “The Lord’s University,” wanted nothing to do with Cleon Skousen’s “brilliant” political rants, and basically still doesn’t want anything to do with the man. For the record, I didn’t want Cleon Skousen to pull any more answers out of his backside. It’s not that he wasn’t intellectual enough, it’s that he was wrong. It’s that he apparently just jumped to half-baked, paranoid conclusions, pointed fingers of conspiracy randomly at convenient targets, and made stuff up.

The following isn’t Skousen, but it’s a good sample of what W Cleon Skousen’s twisted ramblings have lead the so-called “Conservative” moment into. This is a little tract I’ve hung onto from EJ  Blackstone, a once popular local Christian conspiracy nut, big-time Bircher, and God only knows what other Right Wing causes he’s affiliated with at this point. In this tract from the Carter era, he says the “illegal” Godless, secular humanist government in Washington has seized America and is acting as the proxy American Politburo, rendering the nation just another slave state of the Soviet Union:

“There are three Supreme Court decisions that essentially declare the U.S. a Christian nation, and the Trinity Decision is only one of them. The Congress has enacted laws that correlates exactly with Marx’s ten points in the Communist Manifesto. This starts with a personal income tax, and moves through a central banking system, redistribution of the wealth, and the abolishment of the Church. The Communists have divided the nation [America] into 10 sub states, and already built concentration camps in three. Each camp holds up to 50,000 inmates, and thousands of Christians who’ve exposed the plot have already been sent there, or been killed.”

Well, I guess Jimmy Carter blew his chance or something. All the Carter administration did was screw things up and wreck the economy. That’s what happens when you vote for a humble Christian peanut farmer and fair carpenter to do a man’s job. No Soviet roundups of Christians that I recall though. I think Carter would have been rounding himself up in one of those.

I don’t know what happened to EJ. He used to skulk around church fellowship halls arranging secret informational meetings about an imminent Apocalypse. Then he just sort of faded out of the local scene in the mid-1990’s. Maybe “they” got him. Maybe he’s in one of those camps. Or maybe he got the secret signal and he’s in a bunker, living on “food insurance” in full communications blackout, still waiting for the Russian takeover. Moscow better get on the ball. I don’t think he had much more than a year’s supply. That’s all Skousen said he’d need—and that came straight from God.

Or maybe the doctors just revoked Ej’s day-pass.

Unfortunately for Klingon Skousen and his Right Wing friends, the whole Berlin Wall coming down thing in 1989 put a large vacant spot in the center of their conspiratorial nut-job pantheon of scary villains. Don’t worry Glenn. As you well know, Cleon finds plenty more out there for us to fear.

I’ll get to those after I rest my typing fingers.

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/08/mormon-bircher-cleon-skousen-was-mitt.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/page_text.php?CISOROOT=/dialogue&CISOPTR=3884&CISOBOX=1&OBJ=3956&ITEM=121

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_289504316

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/16/us/bicentennial-panel-in-california-assailed-over-racist-textbook.html

Glenn Beck Part 2: White Horse Rising

Like a mighty army moves the church of God; brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod. We are not divided, all one body we, one in hope and doctrine, one in charity.

Glenn Beck is in the business of predicting the End of the World. Glenn Beck is looking for that “Epic Battle,” he keeps alluding to, or Armageddon as the Bible calls it—the ultimate battle of good and evil. Glenn Beck has been sucked into his personal seer-stone and now lives deeply enthralled in his newfound Mormon Apocalyptic Wonderland. It may all be new and glorious to Beck, but the rest of us Mormon idiots suffered through the same shtick some thirty or forty years ago. It included a World Commie domino effect that fell on its face, a Soviet Empire that crapped out, a US economy that collapsed, the price of gold and silver skyrocketing. I even worked a while running a concentrating table in a gold refining installation in West Valley Utah around 1984, where we all carted around five-gallon buckets of gold-sparkling black sands and guarded our paydirt by sauntering around the shop packing heat on our hips. The world was going to end that year too as I recall. Nothing much came of it.

What ended instead was the LDS church membership of rather a lot of Glenn Beck-like “Christian Patriots” who backed some ex-Special Forces borderline paranoid named Bo Gritz for president, on the “Restore America to its Constitutional Principles” platform of the short-lived Populist Party. This party became associated with the Posse Commitatus and Militia Movements and attracted far Right elements like David Duke, former KKK notable who disavowed this past Klan allegiance and tried to mainstream his White Supremist Klan base into a functional political action committee along with a host of other tag-ons with no particular qualifications, like rich Okie, Ross “The Boss” Perot. When Gritz got exposed as a BS artist, and dropped his political aspirations because of reprehensible associates like Duke, and organizations like the Michigan Militia, who’s member Tim McVeigh later blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, many of the Mormons and Jack-Mormons who did not follow Gritz to his own survivalist base, “Almost Heaven,” in southern Idaho, ended up founding a survivalist community near Cedar City Utah. They’re still waiting there for the mushroom clouds with their gold and guns and tins of beans, and probably tuning in Glenn Beck from their bunkers waiting for the signal to be given.

Glenn Beck wants to take us there again. It’s back to the bunker for everyone. Reset. Reset. Reset. Jargon. Jargon. Imply Imply. Allude Allude. Beckism Beckism Beckism. Coin Copyrightable Terminology…Market Market Market. It all just means the Sky is Falling. Wait till he’s free from Fox. You’ll see some real freaky preaching then.

Patriot City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Gritz

http://www.hydeparkmedia.com/gritz.html

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/gritz.asp?xpicked=2&item=5

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/29/michigan-militia-group-preparing-anti-christ-web-site-says/

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.asp?xpicked=4&item=19

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Militia

http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/10-best-places-to-survive-in-america

All of these Apocalyptic, Christian America groups, like the Christian Front, who marched in American streets in support of Hitler at the beginning of World War II, have a Christian patriotic theme and focus around a world conspiracy out to destroy the United States. They all claim the nation is soon facing Armageddon, the Last Battle for Good over Evil.

Survivalism mind you, is basically Glenn Beck’s central marketing venture now. Clearly the first priority for any of the Christian Patriot or Christian America groups he fraternizes with is to survive the coming crisis—whatever that may be. They all know It’s coming soon. Whatever it is. And you better be ready for it.

http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/

Sure, Glenn Beck does his research and in that respect he’s not so much an extremist as he is a prophet of the blatantly obvious. But there’s always something churning desperately in the subtext with Beck. Glenn Beck a few weeks back said we’re at the start of 121 days of the most important chapter in the history of the world. Glenn Beck has a huge rally scheduled to save Israel venued on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This he rushed into production safely before Roshashona 2011. I don’t know why it’s always around that holiday but they sure love to plug that date into their calendar of world endings. Beck’s 121 day count is in the same ballpark as all the others. But of course, Glenn Beck doesn’t know what, for sure, if anything is happening when put to the light of scrutiny, so he’s off the “false prophet” charge and free to scoff and mock others who dare set dates.

I get the feeling that Glenn Beck is only able to intimate and hint about something “big” he’s working on, because at any given moment he’s probably still pulling it out of his own arse. But, there’s only a certain strain of crap that gets pulled out of the average Mormon arse, because they’re all part of a system that feeds them on a particular diet of very specific prophetic desperation. This gets digested, works its way through the individual’s system, and emerges as a the same familial feces over and over again through the generations. And every generation, some self-ordained Mormon visionary barely out of his Gospel training pants gets fascinated playing in his own prophetic poo and starts flinging it all over the rest of us.

Glenn Beck is a babe in the woods. He’s missing the “oops…now I’m just being a jackass” chip that shuts the brain down when it goes completely daffy. He means well but he’s fatally naïve. Beck daily warns how Lenin used students, intellectuals, artists and social revolutionaries to pull off the Russian Revolution, and when that was secure, Beck cautions us sternly that Lenin purged all these revolutionaries and installed the Communist Party with Lenin himself as the sole dictator of Russian politics. What Glenn Beck obviously doesn’t see, is that the Christian Nation movement he’s trying to rally from its 1980′s deathbed will do the same thing to him.

Glenn Beck, simply put, is neither one in hope nor doctrine with the Christian Right, the Patriot Movement, the evangelicals, the Silent Majority, or whatever else you want to call his growing flock of Christian political comrades. Glenn Beck is doing nothing new in the Christian Patriot game, he’s just a Mormon so he’s more organized and adept at running “programs” than previous Christian-only efforts. His religious ethos is more inclusive as well. Nevertheless, Glenn Beck will be the first guy out on the street when his own American Crusade liberates his New Jerusalem from the heathen infidels. His Christian comrades-in-arms think he is one. On some level what he’s engaged in amounts almost to self-hate, like a Jew collaborating with the NAZIs to ferret out his brothers and sisters so they can be rounded up and sent to the furnaces.

People look at Glenn Beck and ask, how can both he and Harry Reid be Mormons?

All Mormons actually started out supporting the Democrat Party. The Republicans founded their party upon two main planks: the elimination of the “twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery.” Until the whole polygamy issue came up well into the Utah period, the Democrats were the only party who thought Mormons were mostly harmless, very industrious colonizers, a great block of votes to win in any case, and thus worthy of at least some political protection.

Originally, Mormon communities held all things in common, and when that failed, Mormons still used a systematically communal approach to building, buying, apportioning land and other temporal and governmental matters. Beck however, seems unaware of this near-socialist Mormon heritage or the church’s historical attachment to a Democrat Party that at least at one point was half-conducive to the notion of letting the Mormons found their own state, make their own laws, and live their own religion free of Federal interventions.

So, when I ask my “Still Small Voice” what’s really hauling Glenn Beck’s eschatological wagon so speedily down the road to Doomsday, a whisper comes back in the night saying, it’s three big horses, a red one, a black one, and a white one. A little impression comes to me that Glenn Beck has become indulged in the perennially re-surfacing tradition of what its Mormon proponents like to call the “White Horse Prophecy.” Beck doesn’t specifically quote any this twisted basket’s payload of horsepucky scraped off the barn floor of LDS history. I can smell it on him though. He’s embraced the stink of it if not the literal word of it.

The White Horse Prophecy itself, the centerpiece of a sub-Mormon folk religion, is a “revelation”—as they who believe in it claim—alleged to have been given to Joseph Smith in 1843. It wasn’t written down for a decade, and is based upon the anecdotal memories of two elderly Saints who claim to have heard Smith utter it off-the-cuff one day in his front yard. In this “revelation,” Smith allegedly prophesies that the US Constitution will hang by a thread in the Last Days, but the “boys from the mountain” as it is often colorfully paraphrased in boastful Utah re-tellings, will come riding to the rescue and save it.

The White Horse Prophecy is easily dismissed as grandiose, bunker-mentality-driven braggadocio on its face. Utah had the US Army headed out to subdue Mormonism at the time. It was also a very convenient “memory” that surfaced in time to bolster the Mormon settlers’ notion that they’d made the right choice in heading West, and that America was still God’s Chosen Nation, in spite of the fact that its government and half its citizenry had been trying to kill them all and stamp out their religion from the first day Joseph Smith came out of the trees as a callow youth and said Christianity was all messed up.

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=utah+war&safe=active

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War

http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/u/UTAHWAR.html

LDS president Brigham Young led Mormonism west after the assassination of Joseph Smith. He picked up the subject of the White Horse Prophecy, and reinforced its central theme, In an Independence Day celebration speech in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on July 4, 1854:

“Will the Constitution be destroyed? No: it will be held inviolate by this people; and, as Joseph Smith said, ‘The time will come when the destiny of the nation will hang upon a single thread. At that critical juncture, this people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction.’ It will be so.”

http://www.reliefmine.com/articles/prophecy/94-the-white-horse-prophecy

http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2008/11/beck-hatch-constitution-hanging-by.html

http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/whitehorseprophecy.htm

http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/whitehorse.pdf

President John Taylor, who succeeded Brigham Young, while speaking on Sunday afternoon 31 August 1879 in Logan Utah, expressed similar sentiments:

“…The day is not far distant when this nation will be shaken from centre to circumference. And now, you may write it down, any of you, and I will prophesy it in the name of God. And then will be fulfilled that prediction to be found in one of the revelations given through the Prophet Joseph Smith. Those who will not take up their sword to fight against their neighbor must needs flee to Zion for safety. And they will come, saying, we do not know anything of the principles of your religion, but we perceive that you are an honest community; you administer justice and righteousness, and we want to live with you and receive the protection of your laws, but as for your religion we will talk about that some other time. Will we protect such people? Yes, all honorable men. When the people shall have torn to shreds the Constitution of the United States the Elders of Israel will be found holding it up to the nations of the earth and proclaiming liberty and equal rights to all men, and extending the hand of fellowship to the oppressed of all nations. This is part of the programme, and as long as we do what is right and fear God, he will help us and stand by us under all circumstances.”

On 25 March, 1839, Joseph Smith, while imprisoned in horrific conditions on ostensibly false charges by a deputized lynch-mob in Liberty Jail, wrote:

“The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner; it is to all those who are privileged with the sweets of its liberty, like the cooling shades and refreshing waters of a great rock in a thirsty and weary land. It is like a great tree under whose branches men from every clime can be shielded from the burning rays of the sun. . . .”

As far as the Mormon loyalty to the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution goes, this is what I call, “Hard Doctrine.” It’s not now nor has it ever been in doubt, it is central and essential to the whole religious orientation of Mormonism. I could cite numerous references supporting this notion from a multitude of LDS presidents over the years. But there are also some more specific elements in the White Horse Prophecy that have always been highly dubious. In the words of Joseph Fielding Smith as an Apostle of the LDS Church, in October Conference of 1918:

“I have discovered that people have copies of a purported vision by the Prophet Joseph Smith given in Nauvoo, and some people are circulating this supposed vision, or revelation, or conversation which the prophet is reported to have held with a number of individuals in the city of Nauvoo. I want to say to you, my brethren and sisters, that if you understand the Church articles and covenants, if you will read the scriptures and become familiar with those things which are recorded in the revelations from the Lord, it will not be necessary for you to ask any questions in regard to the authenticity or otherwise of any purported revelation, vision, or manifestation that proceeds out of darkness, concocted in some corner, surreptitiously presented, and not coming through the proper channels of the Church…”

Joseph Fielding Smith incidentally, went on to become LDS church president. In addition to his authority on the matter, on this occasion, he was immediately followed by his father, Joseph F. Smith, who actually was president of the church at the time, and his father was even more blunt in his dismissal of the White Horse Prophesy:

“The ridiculous story about the “red horse,” and “the black horse,” and “the white horse,” and a lot of trash that has been circulated about and printed and sent around as a great revelation given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, is a matter that was gotten up, I understand, some ten years after the death of the Prophet Joseph Smith, by two of our brethren who put together some broken sentences from the Prophet that they may have heard from time to time, and formulated this so-called revelation out of it, and it was never spoken by the prophet in the manner in which they have put it forth. It is simply false; that is all there is to it.

These sorts of official condemnations not withstanding, Mormon conspiracy buffs stick to the White Horse Prophecy like flies propelling themselves eagerly into a pot of honey. Or, more accurately, like flies to a pile of shite, because most of them lay eggs in it and keep hatching brood after maggoty brood of self-created pests ever buzzing around it. The current evolution of the LDS White Horse subculture festered up during the last forty years, starting with the Ezra Taft Benson-era Mormon John Birch Society Generation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

John Birch was an American GI killed just after WWII by Chinese Communists. Birch is purported to be the first casualty of “World Communism.” After the death of infamous Communist witch-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy in 1957, a hard-core McCarthyite from Indiana named Bill Welch founded John Birch’s namesake society in 1958 to continue hunting out commies wherever they may be found and throttle the Red Menace. In most areas, by the 1970’s, Birch elements had broken into separate wings because the Roman Catholics found they were being badmouthed behind their backs between the Born-Again evangelicals and the Mormons–both of whom tended to rate the Roman Pope as the anti-Christ and their Holy Mother Church as the “Whore of Babylon.”

The evangelical or just plain “Christian” faction broke free of the whole John Birch thing toward the late 70’s, and let the Birch Mormons quarrel with the Birch Catholics. “World Communism” essentially collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1989. By then, Christian Armageddonist and evangelical Rapturists were booking their own shows from church hall to church hall across the nation and were freely publishing books and making films and videos on their own, unencumbered by having to be diplomatic in their Last Days scenarios because of Mormons or Jews or Masons or Catholics who might be at a Birch meeting.

Instead of disbanding, slapping one-another on the back shouting, “Mission accomplished,” as the Berlin Wall came down, the John Birch Society decided to keep making money instead. It found a new series of “One World Government” related conspiracies to pander to its already paranoid membership based upon the “Insiders,” a muddled pantheon of capitalists and aristocrats and privileged classes like the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Royal Families of England and a few other countries, the Committee of Three Hundred, and so forth, who the Society now claimed had been the real enemy all along. In short, the John birch Society became a conspiracy nut magnet.

The Mormon chapters of the John Birch Society however, became a Mormon conspiracy nut magnet. In Utah, It became difficult to delineate the difference between a Mormon priesthood meeting and a chapter meeting of the John Birch Society. And Mormon conspiracy nuts brought with them pet Mormon conspiracies that were unique to the Utah pioneer bunker experience.

The Christians, and evangelicals in particular who remained in the John Birch Society helped move its main conspiracy centers around nefarious plots by the United Nations and FEMA to round all Christians up into 50 concentration camps they claimed were already built, one in every state, headquartered in the then being built new automated luggage centre at the Denver Airport. There they would either be forced to accept the “Mark of the Beast,” which was to be a barcode tattoo and set of implanted transmitters connected to the World Central Computer, or they would be killed. (Not kidding.) As the Birch Society moved into the 1990’s, Mormons would have been just tickled to death to explore all of these emerging Christian Birch conspiracies, but, Mormons weren’t the targets of this sinister secret government in the Christian narratives, they were part of it. Along with the Jews and the Masons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-hvPJPTi4

As bizarre as professional cult-escaper/exposer Bill Schnobelen’s claims have been, in the 1990’s, he has to be credited with being one of the most effective Christian evangelists of doom to fully inject anti-Mormonism into the whole pastiche of Christian xenophobic conspiracy theories. Christian conspiracy nuts were so willing and eager to incorporate anti-Mormonism into their end-of-the-World paranoia, that they lapped up anything this repeatedly debunked fraud had to say. They did so on his word alone, claiming to have been a secret-ultra-high-ranking kingpin in the Masons, the Illuminati, Wicca, a Druidic High Priest and a practicing vampire. He also claimed he was also a Mormon for five years—which of course, means he had complete access to all the Mormon “secrets.” According to Schnobelen, one of these secrets is a duplicate Oval Office in the Washington DC LDS temple with powerful transmitters and receivers in the temple spires designed to manage the Mormon Empire when the Mitt Romney takeover of America comes. These communication towers are so powerful they disrupt local communications and endanger air traffic overhead so that planes no longer fly over it. Schnobelen can reveal these great sorts of  plots against humanity, apparently because death-oath-bound, Satanic, World Domination cults like the Mormons, the Illuminati, Masons and Druids, just hand hyper-secret knowledge to anyone who joins up and hangs out a while. These unholy secret orders also don’t apparently do anything but make idle threats when some self-important dickweed trips around the planet exposing these “secrets” to the whole world, and cashing in on the resulting Christian panic.

http://fanaticforjesus.blogspot.com/2011/03/bill-schnoebelen-and-mormons-temple-of.html

http://www.ronpaulwarroom.com/?p=890

http://markdice.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=115:bill-schnoebelen-qformer-illuminati-memberq-is-a-fraud&catid=66:articles-by-mark-dice&Itemid=89

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread337402/pg1

Going into the New World Order and a new century, Mormon John Birchers, unable to play in the evangelical sandbox, leapt gleefully back into their High Priest Groups at the local ward, and re-invigorated their long-time friend, the White Horse Prophecy. They incorporated it into a complex matrix of all the best conspiracies of the world—removing any anti-Mormon elements as they came to them. Now, most of these world-class conspiracy theories were originated by Protestant “Christians” and link everything bad in the world to Jews and Masons, with a shot or two at Roman Catholics and/or the Knights Templar, who again, are purported to be the progenitors of the Masonic orders—or at least some lines of them. The latest combination of these elements has become a popular film and book sensation known as the Da Vinci Code.

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thedavincicode/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry

http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar

http://www.templarhistory.com/

The Davinci Code’s author and the related theatrical feature film’s director openly confess that it’s all a load of BS. Even though it ruthlessly invents and distorts history and craps all over the Roman Catholic faith, they claim it’s only meant for entertainment and they mean no harm by it. But conspiracy jerks all over the world read it and watch it as documented fact.

Mormons have trouble buying into the secret society hysteria on a couple of levels. First of all, Christians have been saying that Mormons are themselves a dangerous secret society for generations. Also, Mormons love Jews, in fact, they led the world in Jew-loving before the Christian Zionists ever realized Jews were blood kin to Jesus and blessed by God. Mormons were Jew-lovers before Jew-loving became fashionable. In a Mormon secret-conspiracy mill, the “World Jewish Banking Conspiracy” which is a central staple of these sorts of One World Government theories, isn’t really going to gain any traction. Sure, there’s a World Banking Conspiracy the Mormon buffs would say—but you can’t hang that just on the Jews. Also, Joseph Smith was a Master Mason. Anti-Masonic conspiracies always link to Mormonism in the Christian conspiratorial mythology. A lot of the Founding Fathers were Masons as well, and the Founding Fathers incorporated a lot of Masonic philosophy if not theology into the US Constitution. Mormons love both the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. They see Masonic participation in the founding of the nation and the writing of the Constitution as enlightenment, not a Satanic plot to enslave American Christians. It would be hard to sell a Mormon who knew his stuff, on the American Revolution as a dark conspiracy effected by the Illuminati that was not intended to establish a haven for intellectual and religious liberty, but really intended to establish a Godless “One World Government.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89SB59DT34

http://www.masonicinfo.com/illuminati.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati

I don’t know what the Roman Catholics Birch fans did when the Russian balloon deflated instead of “going up,” because they met in their secret John Birch cells just like Lenin’s Marxist cells, but again, they too became increasingly annoyed with finding themselves connected negatively to John Birch conspiratorial dogma. Eventually however, without a universally hated pinko in every union and a commie under every bed to focus on, the John Birch Society became increasingly annoying or at least limited and unfulfilling to its Mormon constituency.

As the John Birchers were battling out the end of the twentieth century, yet another conspiratorial nut-branch spun off along libertarian or liberal lines during this period, based upon the example of one Lynden LaRouche. These tended to make the US Government itself the villain in its scenarios, starting with the Kennedy assassination, and of course culminating now in the “911 Truther” movement and related cabals who became convinced GW Bush was Hitler incarnate and the US would be a Police State before the end of his rule. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, became an even easier target for their theories, since he promised to un-do all the Bush era “Homeland Defense” measures and instead upgraded, renewed them, invaded Pakistan, and started lobbing bombs and missiles at Muammar Khadafi

The LaRouche spin-offs tend to be non-religious and often agnostic or atheistic, they don’t figure into the Glenn Beck story except as occasional foils. For all intents and purposes however, they look exactly like the evangelical or Conservative, Religious Right conspiracy nuts, it’s just that they don’t want to put Jesus in the Oval Office. They are a type and shadow, an illustration of how these paranoid groups are capable of sticking their fingers to the conspiratorial wind, and often quickly shift their players and culprits from year-to-year, election-to-election, adapting to any incoming political regime or world theater players, to perpetuate their deluded theories no matter how many times their “well-proven” scenarios don’t pan out, or their “irrefutable evidence” is debunked. These too, play the “Patriot Game,” but in fact, they don’t seem to want a Congress or House or Oval Office at all, or anyone in government at any level telling them what to do at all. And there’s probably a few Mormons or other “religious” folks mixed in there with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

http://www.infowars.com/alexjones.html

As we came to the end of 21st century there were a lot of patriotic, God-fearing conspiracy nuts looking for a new conspiracy nut messiah. They were also looking for some new conspiracies that didn’t personally implicate themselves. They didn’t want to have to believe anything too far-out because they’d been burned several times before on that score, and they didn’t want to hang out with lawless, dope-smoking libertarians.

Enter Glenn Beck. Enter the mainstreaming of Mormon eschatology. Enter the evil Progressives, the enemy for the new generation of conspiracy freaks. Enter “Spooky Guy,” George Soros.  Who wouldn’t couldn’t help but be enthralled in the machinations of this Godless, manipulative, multi-billionaire who helped NAZI’s harvest Jewish property as a kid? Soros is a lifelong fan of Progressive Fascism who currently speaks openly about his wishes to bring forth a World Socialist Utopia. If an ecumenical, patriotic culture of conspiracy freaks is to succeed, it will need great villains, common to all sides, and Soros certainly fits that bill.

Beck is also in the process of resuscitating the Russian Federation as a credible threat to world and domestic security. “Crazy Ivan” is too good a foe to lose for Apocalyptic purposes. The Chinese just seem to be making sneakers cheaper than anyone else. The North Koreans would like to be menacing, but they still can’t lob anything over our back fence. And then there’s the Muslims. Beck has a much harder time than many others in his field, in admitting that there is some sort of “sane” Islam. He doesn’t seem very aware that the Salt Lake church has been chumming up to rich Muslims like the Kashogi family for ages, and teaches that the “Children of Ishmael” are also protected by God and heirs to the blessings of Father Abraham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi

Glenn Beck, for all his great ability to read books, apparently hasn’t yet read any on the Crusades. I know he’s read up on American Christians kicking the crap out of Native Americans and Mormons, but in all his lecturing on the evils of Islam, he’s never once mentioned the Mother of all Wars, so far as the middle east is concerned, the “liberation” of Jerusalem, the rape, murder and pillage of Palestine that we still call the “First Crusade.”

The word “Crusade” literally means carrying the cross of Jesus ahead of you in battle as you slaughter, steal and destroy everything and everyone falling before your mighty Christian army, just to teach the infidel how mighty Jesus is. Christians still use the word like it was a good thing.

The first Crusade of 1095 or so, was conducted exactly like a “Jihad” to recapture the Holy Land. The first batch of knights to head out of European “civilization” to rescue the birthplace of Jesus from the heathens, ran short on their hastily gathered food and other stores in what is now Germany, and decided just to plunder and murder the local Jewish villages instead. They never made it to the Crusade. It gets worse from there, but most Christians still maintain that God commanded the English and European nobles to commit this bloody mayhem because the Muslims and Jews had it coming.

http://christendomsfolly.xanga.com/677903221/item/

Even a casual researching of what actually went on during the Crusades should convince the most faithful Christian that these Crusaders were not very Christ-like at all. Those Christian Privateers who managed to find Palestine, rode into Jerusalem and slaughtered every Muslim man there, and many of the women and children. Then they seized the surrounding lands and booty from the surviving locals, divided it all amongst themselves and set up little fiefdoms.

The Palestinian natives all looked the same to the Crusaders, with those towels on their heads of course. So the Crusaders just killed everyone who looked brown and they couldn’t understand–including the Christian guardians who’d been servicing and protecting the holy Christian sites and shrines for hundreds of years. And of course they killed off a lot of Jews while they were at it. Killing Jews wherever and whenever they popped up was just standard operating procedure for a Christian Knight. Where do you think the KKK got their pattern from?

http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/firstcrusade/Overview/Overview.htm

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/medieval/history/highmiddle/bernard.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/the-first-crusade.htm

Beyond Glenn Beck’s fairly sane analysis of current political and social movements around the world, and his ability to reasonably identify and prove who the bad players are in all of it–he always leaves you with the impression that there’s something he’s holding back because the world just can’t handle the truth. I wouldn’t say Glenn Beck keeps a consulting a copy of the White Horse Prophecy just off-camera, pinned to the wall with yarn strings connecting its passages to notes, news clippings, and photographs just like on CSI. But when there’s a horse in the room with you, the room smells horsey.

The White Horse Prophecy was allegedly delivered by Joseph Smith on May 6, 1843, following a review of the Nauvoo Legion, the large and well-ordered defense force of the newly founded Mormon base city in Illinois. Two rank-and-file Mormon members, Edwin Rushton and Theodore Turley are the source of this story.

At this review of his troops, Joseph Smith is said to have taken a glass of water in the heat of the day, raised it to his troops and said, “I drink to you a toast to the overthrow of the mobocrats.” The next morning a critic of the church dropped by Smith’s house and commenced cursing him loudly and profusely for making that toast. Smith ordered him out, and hearing this commotion from the street, Turley and Rushdon approached the Mormon prophet to console him over this rough treatment. Smith allegedly told them, “We will have worse things to see; our persecutors will have all the mobbings they want. Don’t wish them any harm. For when you see their sufferings you will shed bitter tears for them.” Edwin Rushton then records:

While this conversation was going on we stood by his south wicket gate in a triangle. Turning to me he said: “I want to tell you something. I will speak a parable like unto John the Revelator. You will go to the Rocky Mountains. And you will be a great and mighty people, established there, which I will call the ‘White Horse of Peace and Safety.’ When the Prophet said you will see it, I asked him, “Where will you be at that time?” He said, “I shall never go there. Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two ‘to defend you’ to throw out the worst part of the laws, so they will not hurt much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, they will treat you like strangers and aliens, and they will not give you your rights but will govern you with strangers and commissioners; you will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed; it will hang by a thread, as it were, as fine as the finest silk fiber.”

…”The time will come when the banks in every nation will fail and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasures. These places will be the White Horse and England’s vaults.”

It rambles on a while and talks about the two Popes reuniting, gathering Jews from the world nations, keeping Russia in check, putting down the Turks and liberating the Holy Land, (Israel, not Utah) and so forth. It uses a white horse to represent the Mormon’s Zion State Smith allegedly envisioned and a couple of other horses figure in there as well, but it’s anybody’s guess what they represent. This Apocryphal vision isn’t unique. There are several similar documents and allegedly prophetic stories along the Mormon trail. They are sometimes called “folk doctrines,” or “faith promoting rumors.” Alleged witnesses and journal-keepers throughout the history of Mormonism have repeatedly jotted down thousands of random ponderings allegedly from Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and other Mormon “authorities.” These records have been religiously (pun intended) maintained but most of them never canonized or even officially debated.

The Problem with Glenn Beck is, first of all, he thinks Mormons are Christians. Worse yet, he thinks Mormons and Christians have a common interest in preserving America as a nation founded upon the freedom to worship God according to the conscience of every individual citizen. Glenn Beck thinks American Christians understand that the United States is a pluralistic society, a Constitutional Republic founded on the free agency of man and the common belief in Nature’s God.

Glenn Beck is a Useful Idiot of the Holy Conspiracy.

In fact the Holy Conspiracy was eagerly promoting a Common Law theory called “jury nullification,” in its heyday ten or twenty years ago, which means any jurist on a case who believes the law in question is ungodly, has the Christian duty to vote the accused innocent, thus nullifying the law. Conversely,  even if the Christian jurist knows the law or charges are spurious, but the accused has it coming from God, then it is good Christian stewardship to vote “guilty” regardless of the evidence. Specifically this was addressed to those “Christian Patriots” in the day, who were accused of bombing abortion clinics, caught refusing to pay income tax to an evil federal government, and so forth. It’s exactly the sort of “Christian” stewardship that let Joseph Smith’s killers got off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/nyregion/26jury.html?_r=1

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/084742-2011-02-28-jury-nullification-advocate-is-indicted.htm

You can’t blame Glenn Beck for being confused about his non-Christian status. Some years back the Mormon church engaged in a multi-multi-million dollar missionary and media effort to convince the world (and themselves) that Mormons were Christians like any other Christian. (At the time Beck may have been too drunk to notice.) In most Christian circles this attempt at re-branding gained Mormonism almost nothing however.

Mormon authorities often make public proclamations actually bolstering the belief that America is fundamentally Christian by Law and Constitution. This is precisely the legal premise upon which Mormonism has been beaten and driven into second-class citizenship for nearly two centuries. Dallin Oaks, one of Mormonism’s most respected academics, former president of BYU, and currently an apostle in the Council of Twelve, quoting former Mormon president, David O. McKay said:

“Recent rulings of the Supreme Court would have all reference to a Creator eliminated from our public schools and public offices. [1962 NY vs. State Board of Regents] “It is a sad day when the Supreme Court of the United States would discourage all reference in our schools to the influence of the phrase ‘divine providence’ as used by our founders of the Declaration of Independence. “Evidently the Supreme Court misinterprets the true meaning of the First Amendment, and are now leading a Christian nation down the road to atheism.”

July 1990 Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, SLC Utah.

Glenn Beck is certainly ignorant of his non-Christian status and indeed a lot of modern American Christians clearly find Glenn Beck’s message quite attractive. This is only due to reciprocal ignorance on the part of the average Christian. They’re often as blissfully unaware of the fundamental doctrines of “Historic” Christianity as Glenn Beck is.

There are no “unalienable rights” granted to man by their Creator in the “Historical” Christian scheme of things. There is only “God’s Will,” and everything that exists is subject to it. The only choice mankind has is to obey “God’s Will” or burn in hell. Those doomed to hell have no business in a “Christian Nation” at all, much less voting on anything.

The Founding Fathers on the other hand, believed that an educated population could rule itself in a just and upright manner, without King or Clergy giving it binding orders. Almost all of organized Christianity to date, has always maintained that man is fundamentally incapable of ruling himself, and that whenever man is given license to choose his own fate, make his own rules, use his own judgment, he will invariably choose to serve his natural evil desires, seek his True Father, his earthly Lord and Master, Satan.

In orthodox Christianity, the closer man thinks he comes to understanding Truth, the farther he can be sure he is getting from it. If it strikes man as good, right, true and logical, you can be sure it is Satan’s program.

Unlike the Founding Fathers, or Mormons for that matter, Christianity holds the core belief that good is only good because God says it’s good. If God said bad was good, it would be. If God says kill babies then baby killing is good. In Mormonism by contrast, truth exists in its own sphere. Truth is truth because it inherently is. God does good because it’s inherently right and God is inherently good. In Mormonism, baby killing is just wrong because it’s wrong to take innocent life. It’s what Mormons call an “Eternal Principle” and not even God can alter the truth of it.

In Christianity, God defines what’s good and what’s evil. God defines what’s true and what isn’t–and this via an incomprehensibly alien mind that humanity could never make sense of anyway so blind obedience is the only proper response to anything “God” (or his agents in the clergy usually…) commands. The Ten Commandments are only true principles because God says they are. There is no intrinsic right or wrong in any of it. Man cannot fall back on his own feeble wisdom and do what he considers to be right as he sees fit—because only God can tell man what that is, so again, even making the right choice without God is wrong. Even thinking you can choose the right without God’s direction is literally damned arrogance.

The concept of human choice doesn’t even exist in “Historic” Christianity. In Mormonism, or the Deist/Masonically-influenced US Constitution, the “Free Agency” of man is the whole point of mortal existence. It’s a training ground whereby mankind makes choices and learns right from wrong until knowing and loving good while dodging and shunning evil becomes an inherent part of man’s character. In Christianity, choice is an illusion.

“You can be a slave of Jesus, or a slave of the devil. Is there any other choice? No there isn’t. Freedom is a myth but you can choose what you’re going to be a slave to, and what you’re going to be free from.”

Father Al Lauer, “Daily Bread,” 15 February, 1989.

“Historic” Christians have always understood that they are saved no matter what, but on the other hand, even the good done by heathens and infidels, or heretics like Mormons, are counted as evil by God and they’ll burn in hell anyway. Christians who kill or repress or brutalize their religious or political opponents at worst will realize how wrong they were at some point in the Final Judgment. But as I say, the Final Judgment is already known and the “Christians” win. More importantly, “Historic” Christianity has always maintained that man is inherently evil, not, as our Founding Fathers maintained, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

And still, Glenn Beck does not catch on to these basic differences between his view of God and Government, and that of rather a large part of his throng of public followers. Glenn Beck is preaching Mormon ideology to the same people who burned his pioneer Mormon forefathers out of Missouri, murdered his founding prophet Joseph Smith in Illinois, and raped, pillaged, starved, robbed, chased, and slaughtered his early American “Saints” out of the United States entirely, into Mexican Territory. And when it looked like the Mormons weren’t going to die off all on their own in this desolate wilderness, the forefathers of his modern Christian supporters sent out an army of destruction, followed by troupes of Baptist, Methodist, and other “Christian” forces of “civilization,” to tyrannize and browbeat his forefathers through cannon, ball, and legislative pen. The great-great-grandparents of those who now buy tickets to his “inspiring” shows voted to socially and politically persecute, and eventually legislate the Mormon church and all its members into poverty and second-class citizenship, until they were legally denied any power of self-determination and stripped of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights of franchise.

In only one variant of the American Christian war against Mormonism, this is how the good Christians of Missouri explained their attempted Mormon genocide in 1833:

We, the undersigned, citizens of Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society, in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our county, styling themselves ‘Mormons;’ and intending, as we do, to rid our 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….

It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics, or knaves, (for one or the other they undoubtably are) made their first appearance amongst us, and pretended as they did, and now do, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the Most High God; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder working miracles wrought by the inspired Apostles and Prophets of old.

…More than a year since it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to sew dissensions and raise seditions amongst them….

In a late number of the Star, published in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become “Mormons,” and remove and settle among us. This exhibits them in still more odious colors…for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to,to see that the introduction of such a caste amongst us would corrupt our blacks, and instigate them to blood shed.

They openly blaspheme the Most High God and cast contempt on His holy religion by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues, by direct inspiration and by divers pretenses derogatory to God and religion, and to the utter subversion of human reason.

…

Under such a state of things, even our beautiful county would cease to be a desirable residence, and our situation intolerable. We therefore agree that after timely warning, and receiving an adequate compensation for what little property they cannot take with them, they refuse to leave us in peace, as they found us we agree to use such means as may be sufficient to remove them, and to that end we each pledge to each other our bodily powers, our lives, fortunes and sacred honors. [Emphasis added.]

History of the Church, Volume One , pages 374-375.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMissouri_Executive_Order_44

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/miscNYS2.htm

The Mormons called this the “Mob Manifesto.” The old Christian settlers called this the “Secret Constitution.” the State of Missouri called it “Executive Order #44.” There are still Christians willing to openly argue that it was a reasonable reaction to what they considered some very annoying Mormon neighbors. Christians believe they have a Constitutional right to not be annoyed by non-Christians. I mean this literally, and so do they.

Glenn Beck is fond of using the phrase: “We pledge our lives, fortunes and sacred honors,” or variations thereof, in rallying his  mobs of fans into swearing oaths of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. Apparently he’s not bright enough to realize this phrase was the same phrase used to pledge his own destruction, forsworn generations ago by the very Christians he now seeks to rally for what he thinks is the common good of the nation.

Brannon Howse, founder of Worldview Weekend, which organizes Christian conferences, before Beck’s Washington DC rally in 2011 warned:

“The Apostle Paul warns Christians against uniting with unbelievers in spiritual endeavors. While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck’s conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck.”

David Shedlock, writer with the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts commented on the same subject:

“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God. Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.”

Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in a recent NPR interview said that Glenn Beck’s Mormonism “is not a Christian faith,” though he accepted that president Obama’s liberal Christianity which supported abortion and a host of other ills, was orthodox. Land suggested that, “Perhaps the most charitable way for an evangelical Christian to look at Mormonism is to look at Mormonism as the fourth Abrahamic faith.”

Time’s Amy Sullivan notes in a recent column by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that Moore dismisses Beck for preaching a “watered down theology that’s short on the gospel.”

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/01/04/glenn-beck-and-the-new-evangelical-ecumenism/

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0810/Baptists_vs_Fox_News_at_prayer.html

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/27/some-evangelicals-on-defensive-over-partnering-with-glenn-beck-a-mormon/

Like the evangelicals today who openly criticize Glenn Beck for doing what they wish they could be as successful at doing, the Secret Christian Constitution was authored in Jackson County Missouri, in 1833 by a committee of Christian clergymen. This tribunal was headed by one Reverend Benton Pixley, Baptist, with clergy associates named, Bogart, who was a Methodist and captain in the state militia, as well as Reverends Isaac McCoy, Finnis Ewing, Fitzhugh, Kavanaugh, Lovelady, Likens, Hunter and others, all of whom persistently published anti-Mormon inflammatory tracts and corresponded to local and Eastern papers with libelous abandon against Mormonism.

Pixley was referred to by the Mormons as “a black rod in the hand of Satan.” He had been sent to “civilize” (Christianize) the heathen of the West. He told the Indians that the Mormons were devils who would destroy them. He told the “Old Settlers” that the Mormons were in league with the “savages” and the slaves, and were trying to drive them from their rightful place.

Not to be outdone by Benton Pixley and the Baptists, Reverend Finnis Ewing, head of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, is credited with publishing the definitive anti-Mormon credo:

“The Mormons are the common enemies of mankind, and ought to be destroyed.”

The signers of the Secret Constitution first secured the support of most of the local elected officials and officers of the law. They had long been inciting anti-Mormon incidents under various conspiratorial rationale, and the local rabble was just busting to panic. The situation came to a head on election day in the town of Gallatin. First, a group of Mormons had to box their way into a public polling place that had been blocked by a Christian mob organized by a Christian candidate who claimed they would take over the county if they were allowed to vote. The Christians retreated from the fisticuffs, led by their candidate, and swore to return with firearms. The Mormons came back with their own and shooting commenced.

The Mormons appealed for state protection and the governor sent troops out. Guess what: the troops didn’t protect the Mormons at all. They joined forces with the freelance mobs rallied by Christian ministers and local politicians who had besieged the nearby Mormon settlement of DeWitt, and was trying to starve out its population. One state detachment led by the noble Christian minister, Captain or “Reverend” Bogart, raided the village of Haun’s Mill, trapped most of its men in a blacksmith’s shed, and picked them off through the wide cracks in its log sides. Sardius Smith was a child of ten when a militiaman named William Reynolds found him cowering under the bellows after the battle, and blew off the top of his head saying, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have been a Mormon.” Reynolds bragged about watching the boy’s lengthy death struggle at local grog shops for years afterward. In the same battle, Captain Bogart demanded the surrender of an old man, took the old man’s gun and killed him with his own weapon, and then laughed gleefully as he hacked the body to shreds with a large knife. He and others hacked several of the dead and dying to pieces as well, and left them as an example for those who later had to come claim the dead.

But Reverend Bogart wasn’t so victorious against armed and prepared Mormon defenders. The esteemed Methodist minister had taken his mob-militia through the countryside and began raiding Mormon settlements as he came upon them. It didn’t take long for the Mormons to organize a counterforce, and when Mormons began very effectively taking his troops down right and left, Bogart sent a dispatch to Missouri’s governor Boggs, claiming that the whole county was being overrun by a lawless, marauding Mormon army. In return for winning the election, Lilburn W. Boggs issued a “fire at will” order of extermination.

Armed with the Governor’s authorization, Reverend Bogart fulfilled the aims of Pixley’s Secret Constitution  in the rape and pillage of Far West, where most of Mormondom had surrendered for protection to regular state troops. But by the time all was said and done however, the regulars were so infiltrated with Bogart’s mob-militia and other adventurous types, that as the last weapon was grounded, a “whoop” went out from the soldiery around them. The entire, penned-in and now unarmed Mormon population was set upon and openly brutalized for weeks under the approving eyes of at least twenty Christian clergymen who held court with the militia over the fate of their conquests. Women were strapped to benches and raped to death in full public view while Christian clergymen debated the “heretical crimes” of Joseph Smith within earshot of the screaming.

Smith himself was chained in a public square in the winter rain while Christian militiamen cracked open the skull of a companion so they could challenge Smith to heal him. Smith was forced to watch the brains of his friend slowly ooze out beside him in the storm as they faded into death.

(See Essentials of Church History, or any Mormon history or the Missouri legislative record for the details. Don’t bother looking in Christian retellings, they omit the raping and pillaging and burning and looting and murder and mayhem.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilburn_Boggs

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/findingaids/miscMormonRecords.asp?rec=eo

It’s a recurring theme, I know. I just can’t express the irony of Beck’s affiliation with these sorts of  “Christian America” zealots clearly enough in words: “Historic” Christians have no substantial respect for, or belief in the Constitution, its officers and legal tradition, nor the democratic process in any form, except insofar as these continue in their estimation to coincide with “Biblical” or traditional Christian doctrines and objectives:

“When you’ve got a religious system that denies the divinity of Jesus Christ and the power of the shed blood of Jesus on the cross, then you’d better believe I’m prepared to go to war!”

Bob Larson, “Talk Back,” 8 May, 1991.

“It [Christianity] is a belief that completely molds the lives of those who believe in it.”

James Kennedy, “Truths That Transform,” 15 May, 1991.

Now, apart from complaints about Glenn Beck stirring up the Old Christian Settler’s slaves into rebellion—Beck has received essentially the same criticisms from modern Christian leaders that were used by period Christian clergies in the dawn of Mormonism to kill Joseph Smith and his fellow Saints off. So, on top of dealing with the crushing antagonism of the Godless Secular Humanist/Commie/Progressive social engineers he makes his specific political targets, Beck should also be well aware that he will never be a member of the Christian club. Not even on a political level. The Bible is Christian politics.

It’s not a question of Beck’s intelligence that makes him such an idiot. It’s a question of discernment and not having any natural, healthy cynicism. Mormons in general have neither discernment nor any instinctive skepticism. Glenn Beck has less healthy wariness than most, because there’s nothing more self-righteous or self-absorbed than a reformed hooker. In Beck’s case, make that a Mormon alcoholic. And having conquered that, he now is compelled to make his life worth something, something BIG. SOON. Something. Tune in tomorrow to hear what’s coming next…

While I believe he’s earnest and does his homework, frankly, he’s basically the guy you read about in 1 Corinthians 4:10, making himself a “fool for Christ.” It’s admirable in a way, but embarrassing to watch. Glenn Beck knows that politics is just war by other means. How can he not see that the Christian political soldier marches on to war to enforce this ideology:

“You just look around and see everything that is just and right and good has come at the influence of evangelical Christians!… The unbelievers will be cast into the Lake of Fire. I did not write that. I could not. But the Lord did.”

David Briese, Southwest Radio Church, 14 June, 1991.

Bob Shmitgal makes plain the inescapably negative Christian psyche better than I ever could:

“The humanist idea that I have the goodness in me to become what God created me to be is leading people into hell. Within us there is no good thing without Christ. Even the good things we do without Christ are evil.”

26 November, 1988, “Looking Up.”

The Trinity Decision was a petty US Supreme Court ruling back in 1892, that allowed a local church to import a minister and sidestep some federal protectionist immigration labor laws in doing so. It’s a waste of time to fully delineate the case but the Christian Nation movement is simply in love with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Trinity_v._United_States

http://candst.tripod.com/holytrin.htm

Dr. James Kennedy, and his “Truths That Transform,” on-air ministry led the last century’s Christian Nation movement’s advance into unceasing public Christian intimidation of “non-Christians.” On 26 September, 1988, at the peak of the Last Temptation of Christ mania, he wrapped up his condemnation of the “pagans” responsible for said motion picture, by citing the “Trinity Decision’s” alleged Christening of America as a Christian Nation. Then he outlined the “mission” of the Church in this “Christian Nation”:

“#1 Witness and multiply. If each Christian makes one convert, it would produce a Christian majority overnight.

#2 Obey the Cultural Mandate. Influence young people, the professions, and the press.

#3 Pray to recapture the Christian heritage surrendered in politics.”

Kennedy got blunter in later broadcasts:

“Am I trying to Christianize America? You bet your boots I am…! I’m not only trying to Christianize America, I’m trying to Christianize every nation in the world…! [America was founded] as it says in the Mayflower compact, the birth certificate of America, “for the advancement of the Christian Faith.”

[8 November, 1988.]

“Only those living licentious and degraded lives would object to a Christian government…. We, without a doubt, have far more heathen in America today, than when the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock.”

[Election day, 11 November 1988.]

“I am a conspirator. I am part of the Holy Conspiracy. And I am a conspirator with Christ in the greatest movement in history to change mankind…. The very word [mankind] is ours…. And in case you didn’t know: our side wins! I’ve read the end of the Book! …One day our Lord will crush the head of every serpent…”

[4 December, 1989.]

News for Glenn Beck: You’re a serpent. Think about it. With friends like that, who needs mobocrats?

There’s a fine line between vigilance and paranoia. Glenn Beck doesn’t know what’s on either side of that line.

I know where Glenn Beck is going. I know where Glenn Beck is leading you. Glenn Beck is leading you to a basement full of mildewed textured vegetable protein chunks in five gallon buckets next to your wheat storage. He’s leading you to boxes and cans of freeze-dried ice cream and dehydrated peas. He’s leading you to fifty-gallon drums full of treated water and a hand-powered wheat grinder. He’s leading you to a garage full of 30-pound tins of US Civil Defense candy and protein wafers from 1962 packed out of the subterranean boiler room of the Downtown Athletic Club in 1972 when your ward got to clean out and distribute these expired survival commodities as they disbanded the program. He’s leading you to a lifetime of waiting for three, four, five maybe six “balloons” to go up before you finally tell him to piss off, you want your garage back, and you’re finally going to clean the rotting survivalist crap out of the basement and put in a pool table.

And then you’ll putter along with the rest of us pretty much as usual through another half a lifetime of the same old crap waiting patiently to die, while Glenn counts his gold coins and enjoys life in the catbird’s seat.

Glenn Beck Part 1: High on a Mountain Top…

Until Glenn Beck came along, the only televangelist I ever found intriguing enough to give a damn about was decades back when Jim Bakker was building his impressive “Heritage Village” and Heritage USA theme park, which once almost rivaled Disneyland. Bakker had his time in the sun back in the mid 1980’s to about 1987, in the heyday of televangelism. It was a time when any evangelical, born-again, charismatic, freelance, weird-arsed pastor of some half-legitimate denomination could invent his own religion from scratch and promulgate whatever quasi-Biblical theories he pulled out of his backside and put it on the broadcast airwaves in almost complete secrecy. Nobody but the zealots were watching what went on, and you had to know what backwater radio or TV channel to dial in at some usually unpopular hour of the day to get the message. They had a favorable Conservative administration going for them and it was years before YouTube or Facebook made it a sure bet you would find every dumb-assed thing you said five minutes ago spread all over the globe for everyone to laugh at. The fact is, Bakker had me just about convinced that he was at least sincere in his Christian intentions when I suddenly found him exposed for frolicking with a church secretary in the storage closet on the cover of all the tabloids.

http://www.thepropheticyears.com/wordpress/jim-bakker-is-back-on-the-air-and-cooks-up-a-new-village.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker

http://www.lifeinthespiritradio.net/

http://www.heritageconferencecenter.org/

All Glenn Beck needs is a heavy coat of mascara to make those crying jags visually spectacular and he’d even equal good old Tammy Faye Bakker’s shows of sincerity as she begged the viewing audience to help save their ministry for the good of the children and families they were serving. Not my main point. Sort of a cheap shot. But it had to be said.

Jim and Tammy’s “ministry” fell into one of the categories of the tent-show fraternity I’d have to classify as the “Drama Queen” school of fund raising. Faith Healers would be another sub-category of the broadcast revival tent circuit. Another evangelical branch calls itself the “Faith Message” or “Whole Gospel” ministry. The Drama Queens make their money and converts by building some huge, ostensibly beneficial monument to their own greatness or charity—like a Christian Family Theme Park, or a Children’s Medical Center, or a University. Every week then they invent (usually legitimate) some financial crisis that will destroy all their great work within days if such-and-such a donation goal is not met. The Faith Healers ostensibly obliterate cancers and tumors, re-grow kidneys and broken bones, speak holy-sounding gibberish whenever plain English isn’t selling the crowd, and for this entertainment their followers are so impressed by these Spiritual gifts that they throw money at them. The Faith Message types tell you that God wants you to be rich and all you have to do is prove your faith by sending them your paycheck every week and God will return it tenfold, or an hundredfold. They’ll also bless handkerchiefs and mail you one for a price as a “prayer cloth,” whatever that is. And of course, they all diversify and cross in and out along any of these lines as opportunity arises. Glenn Beck too, expropriates many of these techniques but his message doesn’t much fit into any of these main mission statements. Glenn Beck is however, a very keen member of what I call “The Prophet’s Club.”

Glenn Beck has strapped his saddle on the big White Horse of prophecy, mounted his steed and now wants to take us all along for the ride.

Glenn Beck didn’t invent eschatology—the peculiar Christian hobby of pondering mostly Bible-based “End Time” scenarios. But he’s the leading exponent of the craft today. But again, he’s functioning on a slightly different plane of existence than say, Hal Lindsay, the 1970’s Christian author who wrote the oddly popular The Late Great Planet Earth, popularizing his Zionist fables about the Book of Revelations that fadded out a generation ago but keep getting revived.

http://www.hallindsey.com/

The thing about predicting the End of the World is, if you keep at it long enough eventually somebody will be right.

Obviously, as a Mormon, Glenn Beck also isn’t quite in sync with Lindsay’s fellow dispensationalists, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who in 1995 began their sixteen volume best-selling Christian series called Left Behind, attempting to scare the bejeezes out of their Christian readership just enough to cling to their faith in Christ–but hopefully not their wallets. Or, God forbid, give all their money and property away before buying the complete series.

http://www.leftbehind.com/

Lindsay, LaHaye and Jenkins’ Rapture craze is still limping onward into the 21st century. Christians, mostly young ones, still buy their books, watch the particularly lame movie offshoots mostly under duress on a youth night with the hip young pastor “Bob” who wears a turtleneck and sweater vest instead of vestments or a suit and tie, and for those whom this Rapture scare is still new enough to be rapturous, they find consolation and peace in imaging they will thus avoid the imminent tribulations fated for the infidels and lesser Christians at the rise of the Antichrist, in their chronology, some seven years or so before the Glorious Second Coming in “Power.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology

http://www.hallindsey.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Lindsey

Granted, Glenn Beck’s founding Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, was himself well into the dispensationalist, End Time-scenario camp. Dispensationalism was a school of Biblical examination that evolved most vigorously going into the first frenzied expectation of Christ’s mighty return at the end of the first millennium AD. It received another big boost going into the turn of this last millennium. Sadly, the program of the Second Coming repeatedly failed to go as its watchers and scholars planned, so the various Christian, Mormon and other apologists attempted to explain inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the way God and His relationship to mankind was portrayed in Holy Writ by making God’s Word contingent upon a related timetable of human development or Divine cultivation of the human race. If God didn’t “change” it seemed that at least the way he dealt with man, his rules, his commandments, his timing, math and calendaring, even his physical nature or lack thereof apparently did, as recorded through the ages, and throughout a host of changing environmental, social, and political venues all over the Bible, particularly between the Old and New Testaments. So theologians invented (I mean found evidence in the Bible…) that God had actually planned His Creation (and un-Creation) timetable in distinct epochs, or “dispensations,” each with sometimes radically different game plans, schedules, and therefore rules.

Unlike Christians, Mormons gravitated to a concept of non-fixed dispensations, of no particular set time period. The whole business of Apocalyptic Bible math never really figured into the Mormon Second Coming narratives. Date setting at least in official Mormon circles has never had much to do with their constant expectation that it could happen at any moment without warning. Or not. And early Mormon depictions of Jesus returning showed Him zooming down the Salt Lake Valley from On High to pop into the Salt Lake temple apparently.

In several Christian eschatological schools there emerged a promised period known as the “Rapture,” where the followers of Jesus would be caught up in glory at His Coming. Only after His chosen ones were safe in His bosom would God let all the bad things prophesied in the Apocalypse begin, like the seven-year rise and rule of Satan or the Anti-Christ on earth. This was first popularized by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century. As the time of “Tribulation” commences, it is generally boasted that the Christians (the true ones that is) would get a ringside seat in Paradise to watch their foolish non-Christian mortal compatriots suffer below. These theories are based in Biblical verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:15–7 . The pre/mid/-Tribulation Rapture theories became extremely popular around the turn of the 20th century. Hal Lindsay made the pre-Tribulation version most fabulously popular at the present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture

http://executableoutlines.com/end/end_01.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation

Important “dispensations” in Christian and Mormon eschatology include particularly what the Mormons call the “Dispensation of the Fullness of Times,” in which Jesus returns in glory. In Mormon theory, and many Christian schools, there follows a thousand years of perfect, Godly earth life where evil is swept clean from the planet. Before that however, there is also this Tribulation time, featuring a the direct rule of Satan on earth and a big hairy battle to kick him and his followers out when Jesus comes. Generally, it is proposed that there are seven of these dispensations throughout Biblical time, and a lot of dispensationalist thought connects directly to the “Seven Seals” mentioned in Revelation 8. This passage discusses the opening of some figurative, “Seventh Seal,” which also has seven subsets of prophetic or allegorically predicted historical events that then ensue. Again, generally, with a few other favorite scriptures like the prophetic writings of Daniel, which they link all together, those who either try to narrow down the season of Christ’s Return, or those who actually try to name a date or a year, imagine it’s just a question of figuring out the symbolism, connecting it to current events and world players, and BINGO!

http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/prophecy/revbook/trump1-5.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/seven-seals-trumpets.html

http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevnseal.htm

http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevnseal.htm

It is often assumed in the Mormon church that Joseph Smith, like his Christian competitors, spoke a lot about the Book of Relations or the End Time prophecies of Daniel and overtly engaged in promoting the imminent End of the World. This isn’t really true. He seems instead to have addressed the whole matter of sign-seeking and date-setting and Second Coming-guessing only to shut up those amongst his flock who were so caught up in the notion that Jesus would be in town by the weekend, that he felt obligated to set them straight.

http://www.exmormon.org.uk/tol_arch/whyprophets/prophets/j_smith.htm

In all honesty, while Glenn Beck may have it all figured out, not even Joseph Smith entirely nailed the subject of Christ’s Return before he was murdered. Indeed, neither the Mormon nor the Christian has ever been in agreement even amongst themselves over the order in which these Apocalyptic dispensations or inter-dispensational events will take place. Conclusions drawn from even the canon is up to great debate and there is no consensus. Furthermore, Apocalyptic prophecies outside the Bible have always been sucked into the eschatological whirlwind of signposts and revelatory wonderments, from Nostradamus (Nostradumbass as I call him) to the contemporary apostate Mormon version, the “Parowan Prophet.”

In 1984, a fringe lunatic in the outer reaches of the Utah wilderness named Leland Freeborn, foresaw nuclear mushroom clouds rising over the Wasatch Front and it got published in a regional rural tabloid. For a week or so his babblings sent half the state into U-Haul yards to load up their survival kits and head into the safety of Monument Valley several hundred miles south. The other half the state had “End of the World” parties at BYU and in public parks throughout Salt Lake City. The lines of believers-vs-scoffers were not drawn upon the usual Mormon/non-Mormon lines either. If that weren’t dumbfounding enough, the same character is still in business and has authored numerous “prophecies” right up to the present, which also haven’t come close to panning out. These include nationwide riots that the Russians were supposed to foment and take advantage of to lob nukes at the US after the election of Barack Obama, which Freeborn forecast in 2008.

http://www.parowanprophet.com/prophet%20intro.htm

http://www.parowanprophet.com/

http://www.livescience.com/3159-parowan-prophet-predicts-nuked-christmas.html

In the Mormon continuum, those same ostensibly devout Mormons who in 1984 trotted off to the canyons on the say-so of one of their apostate nutcases, were already food storaged-up and had head-fulls of paranoid Cold War nuke-yuh-lur hole-uh-cost scenarios and generations of LDS leadership perpetually urging each member to store a “year’s supply,” stemming primarily from the Great Depression era dustbowl mentality. Mormons have been infiltrated for decades now by political theories about a Soviet invasion and destruction of America, and this originally from the John Birch society, which became an insidious polluter of Mormon popular doctrine in the very late 50’s and early 1960’s, when church leaders like then apostle, and eventually president, Ezra Taft Benson, said it was the best thing since sliced bread. Mormonism has been sprung tight and fully cocked on a hair-trigger for generations, just waiting for the word to come down from On High or “The Balloon” to go up.

The Christian camp was also affected by the emergence of late-50’s Birch Society political conspiracies, but had always entertained its own uniquely paranoid evangelical fears as well. Since the late 70’s a faddish wave of Christian doomsayers that struggles for life still today, has produced numerous even more widely attended evangelical Christian versions of Utah’s quasi-Mormonish Leeland Freeborn. This began with American cultural overthrow theories centered around  “cults,” which word incidentally, they so entirely re-defined in popular usage to always infer a Satanic or evil connotation that academia abandoned the word in favor of “newly emerging religions” in the 1980’s.

Most Christian prognosticators of Doomsday generally grasp at any prominent natural disaster, or rise of any petty tyrant in the political world, even the success of any particularly powerful capitalist who seems to be getting his way too much, as a timeline marker they link to one intellectually challenged Biblical signpost or another. None of them ever sticks entirely to the Bible or “orthodox” Christian sources any more than the Mormons and quack-Mormons stick to their “authorized” sources. Not even the late Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of the Cults who first got the “cult” epithet to stick to Mormonism in the early 1970’s, actually based any of his dire warnings of a coming swarm of Satanic Pagans and Mormons, on either the Bible or for that matter, reality. His believers of course claim however, that this is exactly what he did—drew his conclusions entirely from the Bible.

Walter Martin in fact set himself up to be America’s primary judge of Christian orthodoxy, and his first effort in 1955, was to declare the Seventh-day Adventists “orthodox,” subclassing them as in the evangelical branch of the Church. This really pissed off most of evangelicals, but Martin stuck to his guns and went on to found the Christian Research Institute in 1960. The Christian Research Institute, went on to stick the label “cult” to anyone or anything Walter Martin didn’t think made the Christian roster, and he kept at them until it stuck in popular culture. He didn’t just go after Mormons and Moonies, he scrapped with many of his contemporaries in the “Christian” ministry field, and even hosted a self-descriptive radio show he titled, “The Bible Answer Man.” Martin and his CRI were one of the first pillars of a resurging American Christian purity movement that became the current Christian Nation Movement. The whole train of thought moving this forward is the notion of first purging the Church of “cults” and false Christians, and then purging the nation of them.

Walter Martin, the man who wrote The Rise of the Cults in 1955, and put Mormonism squarely in the threatening pack of “cults” on the rise, is also the mentor and forefather to most of the people Glenn Beck is now trying to rally behind him to put God back on the political throne of the United States of America. Unfortunately for Beck, they’re fine with putting God back on the throne of American government, they just don’t think it’s Glenn Beck’s God they want there.

Going into the 1980’s, evangelical Christian hucksters began expanding upon Walter Martin’s anti-“cult” theories. Foremost of these would be subsequent witch hunters like Bob Larson and his Talk Radio conversations with demon-possessed teenagers, Bill Schnoebelen and his travelling xenophobe show where he reveals the dark secrets of every Godless secret order ever rumored to exist because he’s apparently been a major officer in all of them at one time or another, and the likes of the infamous Ed Decker and Dave Hunt, who really boosted anti-Mormonism in 1984, when they found the perfect boogie man for the young naïve Christian by making up outright fables about Mormonism and “proved” it clearly to a generation of Christianity’s most gullible servants by combining mostly fake footnotes and a load of nonsense with every anti-Mormon rumor ever recorded over the generations into the comically inflated book of blood libels, The Godmakers. Seeking bigger and bigger spiritual thrills, Christian conspiracy nuts moved their efforts forward into an evangelical social movement against what they now called the “occult,” taking it up a notch.

While not politically organized at first, the 70’s-late 1980’s burst of Christian End Time fury was propelled by theories about a fictional rise in Ritual Satanic Abuse, witchcraft, and devil worship in general. This occultic connection fad died out of the Christian medicine show circuit towards the end of the 1990’s, when several psychological investigations proved that these spook finders had created an hysterical mental illness plague they’d hyped into existence themselves. It was a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, by then many of them were calling themselves “prophets,” and had redefined the word enough at least in the Charismatic sects to be comfortable applying it to themselves and those they felt spoke for God, even if it was in a stream of glossallalial gibberish. Bob Larson’s dialogue with teen demons got repeatedly exposed as nothing more than the classic use of a shill on the other end of the phone, and his travelling exorcism show likewise got caught with it’s pants down when various journalists exposed his use of shills and paid players in the act. Larson turned out also to have invented a “Vanilla Ice” sort of phony rock-and-roll background he used as a basis to impress his teen ministry client base. He claimed Jesus saved him from a debauched history of playing rock music at Christian youth dances, where he deliberately corrupted whole churches. Turns out he never had much of a band, it wasn’t very edgy anyway, and those who remember those youth dances say his tales of debauchery and drink were total bunk. Bob had his fake epiphany, formed a youth anti-rock ministry, and Bob and Christianity’s youth were saved etc. In his dreams that is.

When the Christian public actually got to the point that it knew enough Mormons that didn’t find Mormonism scary enough to pay money to see it berated, Decker and Hunt did their best to move into the anti-Masonic, “cult,” and various evil conspiracy trade. They also tried to boost their claims against Mormonism in light of several exposes of their utter lack of scholarship or basic accuracy in The Godmakers, and tried to pin the full “occult” label onto Mormonism. They hopped up their anti-Mormon efforts with a movie release and expanded their asinine circus act which featured models prancing onstage in “Mormon Magic Underwear,” and so forth, took it on the road around the nation’s church basements and fellowship halls, until at one point even the seasoned, venerated, anti-Mormon ministry run by Gerald and Sandra Tanner had to tell them basically to shut the feck up because they had no idea what they were  talking about.

And to round out the era, Walter Martin suddenly died in 1989 and Hank Hanegraff, his sidekick for years, took over the CRI and the post of Bible Answer Man—and went about almost immediately reversing most of Martin’s theology, by thoroughly trashing the entire concept of a Pre-Millennial Rapture and Dispensationalism in general.

http://www.raptureready.com/who/Hank_Hanegraaff.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ralston_Martin

http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Makers

http://www.masonicinfo.com/schnoebelen.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Schnoebelen

http://www.withoneaccord.org/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4208453336947193899#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Larson

http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss100/larson.htm

In fairness to Glenn Beck’s Christian friends and rivals, the Bible does talk about an event Christians can reasonably call the “Rapture,” in general terms. The most popular timing of this event however, in historical terms, has been after the Tribulation period. The Tribulation is basically shared ecumenically in the Apocalyptic trade. The highly debatable pre-Tribulation relocation of Christian ascension to Jesus however, allows the faithful to skip out on the openly Satanic domination of mankind the Tribulation is predicted to hold for anyone around to see it. All I can say is, this seems basically just a rather convenient recruiting tool.

In most modern End Time scenarios, Christian, Mormon, or otherwise, the Antichrist takes over the UN, seizes control of Israel, and presents himself to the world as its Savior. Somewhere in there the world fights the ultimate battle of good over evil in the valley of Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, which again is something the pre-Tribulatory Rapture proponents say the faithful get to avoid. Unfortunately, Even following a single narration of all the available and highly varied End Time theology is too complicated to outline in a few volumes, much less a few paragraphs. The whole End Time calendar suffice it to say, is and always has been highly subjective and only vaguely doctrinal in whatever Christian sect or denomination it has been formulated. This includes the Mormon version–or, make that Mormon versions.

Contrary to popular belief–even in the LDS population itself–the LDS church has never officially gotten into the “Chicken Little” business, except in the most vague and general way of urging preparedness for when it happens, whenever that might be, always however, conveniently including the allowance that it could happen at any time—including immediately. This nudge and a wink about possible End Time imminence from latter-day prophets is every bit as motivating to the Mormon body of faithful as a specific date and time would be to any run-on-the-mill devout Christian who has been sold on nailing the Rapture down to the split-second via strict Biblical numerology.

In order to homogenize John Birch-like political conspiracies, current events, a delusional sense of chosenness and paranoid fear of non-Christians or “cults,” most so-called “historical” Christians who specialize in these End Time Biblical passages, have had to accept key changes in their attitude toward the “Christ Killers,” or in polite terms, the Jews, as they have been clearly described by very many Christian Church Fathers through the centuries. That the Jewish race has been cursed by “historical” Christianity is not debatable given the plethora of historical Christian literature and dogma blatantly saying so. Luther and Calvin both were raving anti-Semites so you can’t blame it all on the Popes either. The reason for this Christian evangelical change of heart on the subject of Judaism, is that by actually reading many of these prophetic Biblical scriptures, these modern Christian scholars and Apocalyptic dabblers came to the sudden realization that the Jews are in fact still God’s Chosen People.  Jesus, they realized, was a Jew. Jesus was also apparently quite happy being a Jew. Jesus came specifically to minister to his own people, the Jews, not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, not the Holy Roman Empire, not the Eastern Church founded by the Hellenized, Roman Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who wanted to kill Jesus. (St. Paul.)

In normal context Christianity has been able to explain away the Jewish Biblical blessing by claiming that they had their chance and blew it. They killed their own Messiah. Through Paul, most Protestants and the Eastern Church claim God took His blessing to the Gentiles and cast the Jews all over the face of the earth, cursing them as punishment. The Jews therefore have always made a comfortable fit in a host of Birch-like World conspiracies. For the Christian eschatologist however, in putting all the canonical evidences together and trying to make sense out of them, it became obvious that the re-establishment of the nation of Israel, the rebuilding of the temple there and an expected righteous Jewish return to the sacrifices of the Law of Moses, would be central to the whole series of Biblical events wrapping up man’s time on earth. This got them tagged with the epithet, “Christian Zionists.”

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/State/ZIONISM-+Background.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12516.htm

http://www.christianzionism.org/

http://www.911-strike.com/christian-zionists.htm

Mind you, not all Christian prophets of doom are on board with the idea of inextricably linking the End Time fate of the United States of America and the return of Christ to receive a Jewish Zion in Israel. Rather a lot of them figure Jesus and His New Jerusalem will be moved to southern California or something, and the Jews are going to be left holding the the bag as He thumbs his anthropomorphic nose at them while the Destroying Angel bakes them in a smoking crater after Armageddon. Many of them think Jesus is coming, and He may be coming back to Israel, but when He gets there it’s payback time for thems what done Him in.

At a rally sponsored by Jim Robison’s "Religious Roundtable" in 1980, Bailey Smith, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said:

"It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray, a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friends, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

The late Jerry Falwell, Founder of the Moral Majority, and one of the “Christian Nation” movement’s first notable Christian Zionists, tried to recover:

"This is the time for Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and all Americans to rise above every effort to polarize us in our efforts to return the nation to a commitment to the moral values on which America was built."

Religion in America , W. Hudson, 1987, MacMillan, page 400, and also on page 186 of Southern Baptist Holy War , 1986, J. Barnhart, Texas Monthly Press, Austin TX.

Glenn Beck as a Mormon wasn’t the first to come up against Christianity’s problem with an Israel-based Apocalyptic orientation. The late Jerry Falwell, the late James Kennedy, founders of Christian lobby groups like the CRI, the American Family Institute and others, the originators of the latest Christian Nation movement, were banging heads with their own kind on the issue for over three decades before Glenn Beck ever climbed out of his bottle, got out of “Morning Zoo” Top-40 radio and discovered both God and the Talk-Jock format apparently at the same moment.

Though the Christian Nation movement is often linking the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount as the "Judeo-Christian" basis of American law and justice, neither of these is actually even implied in the Constitution. And most Christian Constitutional advocates would have a hard time accepting anything "Jewish" from the pages of the Bible except for those Ten Commandments. In reality, the Christian Nation tent a very small and exclusive one Mormons have never been, and never will be invited into with universal applause. If “authorities” and founders of the Christian Nation movement like Walter Martin don’t even think Roman Catholics make the cut, Mormons and Jews won’t ever pass the muster.

http://apprising.org/2008/10/12/dr-walter-martin-speaks-on-the-roman-catholic-church/

http://www.waltermartin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2067

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3s0rn7InSQ

While Christians are late in combining their “Christian Nation” theories with Apocalyptic Zionism, Mormons, if nothing else, have in fact led the charge in promulgating, and probably inventing, American Christian Zionism. As early as 1840-41, at the height of his own persecution and travails, Joseph Smith sent the Jewish convert Orson Hyde to Palestine to dedicate the land for the gathering of Israel. Most of Christianity at the time was very keen on seeing that this Jewish national and cultural reassembly did not happen. For instance, a lot of faithful Russian Orthodox lads presumed to throw Christ’s deadly retribution at the Jews very directly in the Czarist era pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some good Lutheran boys followed the trend toward ridding the Christian Master Race of the Jewish pests in NAZI Germany–trying to insure that the “diaspora” became the “die-outspora.” In contrast, the Mormon Orson Hyde was charged with the assignment to dedicate the Holy Land (not Utah mind you, the other Holy Land) for the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple, the return of Israel from the diaspora, and the coming of the Lord to receive and bless His Chosen Ones. (And Glenn Beck plans to be there when it happens, so get your tickets soon…) In the meantime, Joseph Smith was laying out street maps and architectural plans for the raising of New Jerusalem at Adam Ondi Ahman (billed as the site of the original Garden of Eden) along the east bluffs of the Grand River in Daviess County Missouri. In short, Mormons have always connected the US and Israel as the two choice nations uniquely sanctioned by God at the End of Days.

Mormons are so pro-Jew they believe that baptism into the church constitutes an adoption into the House Of Israel. They believe descendants of the tribe of Levi have the right to preside as a local bishop without counselors. For generations they called non-Mormons "Gentiles," unless they were Jews.

http://lds.org/scriptures/history-maps/photo-10?lang=eng

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire

Now, Glenn Beck and most other Mormons may mock the ongoing parade of Rapture-based Christian prophets of doom in the media today, but the truth is, Mormonism has never been lacking in any of the same sort of speculations from the time of Joseph Smith onward. The early Saints wrote and acted both politically and doctrinally as if they thought Christ might show up at any moment, or at least by next week—a couple of months, maybe a year tops. The whole point of the Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints, which was tagged on when Smith ran into legal trademark complications) is to establish an infrastructure through which the returned Lord can administer the Kingdom of God on Earth.

As I began this tome, Glenn Beck was preparing to go on the air and lampoon the latest Christian shmuck to have predicted the Rapture and goofed. Apparently this particular dipchip made the same prediction about a decade ago and missed that one too—but blamed it on a math error and got away with it again this year. Before I had completed my research and started back into my first editing phase a day later, the dork had by then announced that it was an “Invisible Judgment Day,” and that the actual Rapture was going to take place on October 21st—five months off again, due to some damned accounting quirk. Prophecy moves pretty fast these days, so I guess if you’re reading this after 21 October 2011, you’ve been “Left Behind.”

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-spokane/planet-earth-misses-scheduled-may-21-2011-rapture

http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/

http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/05/18/may-21-2011-judgment-day-2/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/patheos-on-faith/post/why-may-21-2011-isnt-the-end-of-the-world/2011/05/20/AFoL3u7G_blog.html

Glenn’s target for particular lambasting the last month or so, has been our latest Rapture predicting cluck, an 88-year-old self-described “Bible student” who is probably going to meet Jesus soon one way or another in any case. His name is Harold Camping, and he’s head of something called “Family Radio Ministries.” He is not the first Christian minister to have to run and hide after one of these false Rapture alerts. There have been hundreds if not thousands of them since it became popular to predict the end of the world, back around the turn of the first century AD.

Beating Camping to the boast this Rapture season, some other Christian twit named Phil Rogers blogged the Rapture date to be January 27th 2011, then corrected himself the day before, and added ten more days for addition mistakes. Then he apologized for the whole thing ten days later, and is still predicting and re-predicting the Rapture based upon other absolutely clear Biblical theories that likewise make his numbers certain.

http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/jan2011/philr127.htm

http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/feb2011/philr29.htm

The Jehovah’s Witnesses still lead the tally board in utterly failed Christ Returns, with scores of them over the last hundred years in their sect alone. In 1988, popular radio preacher and author of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be In 1988 and On Borrowed Time, Edgar Wisenant, predicted the Rapture would come during Roshashona of that year, early September. Needless to say, the only person who disappeared from the face of the earth on Roshashona in 1988 was Edgar Wisenant.

http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/fire-in-my-bones/23081-dont-get-infected-with-last-days-fever

http://www.newagegod.com/HURImedia/HuricG2.htm

http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm

http://www.bible.ca/Jw-Prophecy.htm

Glenn Beck is the first commercially successful and widely respected Mormon mass-media evangelist. He’s so far succeeded in this effort by fixating upon only the most universal and superficial, beattitudinal-type Judeo-Christian elements of Biblical wisdom. He’s augmented this by superimposing a presumed common End Time belief over current political and world events that are clearly observable and fairly predictable, while only making the vaguest allusions to the attendant Apocalyptic, Biblical or theological implications of these world-changing elements, leaving his audience free to imagine whatever the hell connection they might want to make. Beck every day in effect, prophesies something big is about to happen, and every day never quite gets around to telling us what it is. And the next day, we all tune in again to see if this is the day he actually spells it all out for us. But no. Just another litany of the dozen or so elements he got “right,” over the year, and a promise at the very end of the show he’s in the process of developing something that will “blow your mind,” but isn’t free to divulge yet.

There is nothing new in Glenn Beck’s bag of tricks. Glenn Beck is what Utah Talk Radio was in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, when I was living in Provo. Beck may not even know that, being originally from the Pacific Northwest as I am. I don’t think Glenn Beck has ever been exposed to the full spectrum of Mormon survivalist, quasi-prophetic lunacy. He doesn’t seem to have been exposed to it long enough to grow jaded, disappointed, and then finally painfully bored with its writhing, evolutionary paranoia that cuts and pastes Holy Writ into regional Mormon folklore, repeatedly trumping up a frenzied narrative pointing to the “Next Big Thing,” that only ever comes up bust. Last week’s collage of random prophecies are shredded and re-pasted into a new roadmap of the Apocalypse, and the process begins again with a new script and a new prophetic leader.

Make no mistake about Glenn Beck. He’s a televangelist. Glenn Beck is running a broadcast ministry. In Mormon culture, this is unprecedented, and the notion of being paid to deliver the Word of God is what Mormons call “priestcraft,” and gets you excommunicated. So he’s treading a thin line there.

Glenn Beck’s argument against the charge of running a religious ministry would no doubt be that he does not specifically proselytize anyone into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He would argue that his message is a universal faith in God, and God’s plan for the United States of America to be a haven for all believers in the “God of Creation,” or “Nature’s God,” as the Founding Fathers often referred to the Supreme Being. What Christians won’t immediately understand, is that this “Savior of the Constitution” scenario is an integral and centrally important principle of the Mormon “Gospel.” There’s nothing inherently sinister or nefarious about this Mormon doctrine at all mind you. Unlike “Historic” Christianity, there is no suggestion or even much of a desire in Mormonism to promote some sort of exclusively Mormon utopian American Government. Mormons simply believe that they are free to exercise their Constitutional rights to vote and motivate and lobby American society and law in as Godly a direction as they can manage within the bounds of the law. If that ends up with Mormons grossly outvoting everyone on everything then so be it. When they talk about “saving” the Constitution, they really mean saving it. For everyone—even the Christian bastards who have been hounding them since 1820. In the Mormon scenario however, nobody should be hounded like that ever again. This is likely one reason the American Family Association rated Mormon Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, one of the most pro-homosexual legislators of 1990 and scored him low on abortion and many other conservative Christian political staples.

http://www.votesmart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=53352

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/02/03/Orrin_Hatch_Open_to_DADT_Repeal/

Ironically from the Left, Orrin Hatch finds many, including the pro-Gay lobby calling him a homophobic moron for saying that Gays and Lesbians didn’t pay tithing because politics was their religion. Not to mention the whole recent California Proposition 8 movement that singled out Mormons in general for opposing an initiative to make Gay marriage legal in that state. Oxymoronically, Mormon Senator Harry Reed, Democrat from another state largely founded by Mormons, Nevada, as Senate Majority Leader, led the party that was entirely opposed to Proposition 8.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story

While the Gay Lefties are beating him up, we see that coming from the other direction, the John Birch society–which the Mormon church at one time practically owned–has gone to town on Orrin Hatch for not being a real conservative.

“The distaste for Hatch focused on what many Utah residents see as his capitulation on abortion, gun ownership, and homosexuality. As they arrived at the convention, delegates were handed a letter documenting Hatch’s softness on the all-important right-to-life issue. Some delegates were angered over his refusal to sign a pledge to veto judicial candidates who aren’t opposed to abortion. Upset supporters of the right to own a gun claimed that the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America had correctly blasted him for supporting several measures targeting private ownership of weapons, including a ban on an assortment of weapons in a huge crime bill, controls on sales at gun shows, and enforcement of trigger locks. Others recalled that, in 1990, the American Family Association publicly criticized Hatch for supporting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its "funding of pornography and anti-Christian art."

http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=87

And that’s also why Mormons are the common enemy of all. Remember that phrase, because it is the key to understanding the religion. The Left lumps Mormonism in with the foaming fundamentalists, and the foaming fundamentalists have been killing and oppressing Mormons for generations as dangerous heretics.

Glenn Beck would likely not see himself as a missionary, but he does indeed attempt to bring people to Christ, he does so however—as Glenn Beck or most Mormons would understand Christ. Beck does so with the inherent Mormon acceptance of anyone who accepts God under any name or title. To be even plainer, if you don’t sign up with the Mormon missionaries for a dunk, you’re still going to a heavenly paradise more grand than you could imagine. Christ’s sacrifice is universal and His Grace is freely given to all who accept Him—and nearly everyone will accept Christ either here or hereafter, because Mormonism doesn’t close the books when you kick the bucket.

Glenn Beck has no dogmatic reluctance to embrace anyone as a brother or sister in his personal or political work, because Mormons literally believe, unlike Christians, that we were God’s children before this mortal life, we are still God’s children, and we will remain brothers and sisters in the Great Beyond whatever our ultimate reward there may be. Mormons easily accept in a patriotic sense, anyone willing to admit some higher power exists and that this higher power has set America above the worldly rabble of nations to insure freedom and liberty for His/Its children.

The Christian perspective on the status of non-Christians however, is that they’re children of Satan. Full Stop. They burn in hell. Thus, in the Christian’s political realm, non-Christians can only have a Satanic and destructive influence on America, if allowed any political power whatsoever.

On 10 November, 1988, on "The Voice of Americanism," Dr. Stuart MacBirney recalled his impressions of the summer’s Olympic games:

"As I sat watching the ‘friendship dance’ performed by thousands of Korean traditional dancers, filling the field of Olympic Stadium, while others touched their tear-filled eyes in an expression that the East and West cultures stem from common roots of the Human Family, the Christians watching were left with a sick revulsion at thousands of deluded pagans, pretending we’re all part of the same Human Family, when in fact they are Buddhists and Hindus, sinners condemned to hell, and trying to lure us all into the pit with them."

http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/voices-shrill-dr-ws-mcbirnie-and-vast

There is no universal morality or "Judeo-Christian ethic" for those patriotic, American evangelicals fond of claiming to be “historic” Christians. "God" is the “Word” and the Word is the Bible. In the Christian scheme of things, social, personal, and political freedom is the total submission to Jesus Christ, God, AKA the Bible . The nation can only be free by subjugating "man’s law," to the Holy Bible. Christians believe no man can be Free unless yoked to the Bible.

James Robison was quite active in the pre-Beck Christian America frenzy before the turn of this century. Those Christian ministers as honest as Robison confessed openly that the entire movement they represent is literally arguing to scrap the legal structure of America in favor of the Bible.

"And if you do not believe the Bible, we have no basis for fellowship. And by believing the Bible, I mean believing that it is the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of the living, eternal God, that it’s God breathed, and that it must be proclaimed without apology in the power of the Holy Spirit."

Page 123, Robison’s, Thank God I’m Free .

In the Religious Right boom times of the late 20^th century, Christian geniuses like the late James Kennedy even coined a word for what they were doing. Kennedy called it the “Holy Conspiracy.” He was joined by other noted Christian patriots like the late Walter Martin, Hank Hanegraaff, and the Christian Research Institute as it sprang up to fight “cults” and recapture America for Jesus. They published "Christian" voting guides and sponsored "God in Government" conferences to tell you and your elected officials precisely how to exercise "good Christian stewardship." But the Mormons weren’t invited to the last Christian America revolution. When the Mormons all rushed in to get a piece of it, they found the national association of “Christian” Boy scouts didn’t even want them at their Camporees.

http://jonrowe.blogspot.com/2005/07/holy-trinity-decision-another-favorite.html

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_boyscouts.html

http://dailyross.com/2010/02/the-bsas-mormon-problem/

http://www.suite101.com/content/mormon-parents-rejected-by-presbyterian-cub-scout-program-a299180

The same LDS apostle/prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, who got Mormons into the John Birch Society by droves, was a lifelong booster of Scouting. He started in 1918 as an assistant Scout Master as the Mormon church was superseding it’s youth internal organization, the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association with Scouting USA. Young women remained in a separate internal church organization, but the young men were soon surrendered to Lord Baden-Powell until its entire young male religious training program was just a Mormon sponsored branch of Scouting USA. Like the Birch Society, Benson thought the Boy Scouts were very butch, well disciplined, patriotic, and wonderfully woodsy. On May 23, 1949 he was elected to the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. He attained all three of the highest national awards in the Boy Scouts of America—the Silver Beaver, the Silver Antelope, and the Silver Buffalo—as well as world Scouting’s international award, the Bronze Wolf.^[6]

In the early days of Mormon Scouting, most boys loved to dress up, run through the woods, build camp fires, pitch tents and teepees, and pretend they were Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Mormon kids, and their older, often no more sophisticated counterparts in leadership, were no different, they just preferred to dress up and pretend to be Jim Bridger or Orrin Porter Rockwell. (Rockwell was Joseph Smith’s personal bodyguard, and Bridger was a mountain man and scout who opened up the Intermountain West.)

The Scouting takeover of the Mormon young men’s program was not without protest. A generation of Mormon parents and grandparents, in spite of authoritative Mormon Scouting boosters like Ezra Taft Benson or recent president Gordon B. Hinckley, thought of Boy Scouts as foul-mouthed ruffians and pyromaniacs unfit for church association. Two or three generations had to pass away before the opinionated Mormon pioneer stock would universally concede that Scouting, as re-defined by Mormonism, is God’s Divine plan for their children and grandchildren.

President Hinckley could have indeed bailed out on Scouting a few years back, amid screaming controversies of Gay inclusion and Christian Scouting’s rejection of Mormonism in their national encampment events. Hinckley instead even more firmly entrenched the Mormon church in the Scouting program. The personal qualities Mormons seem to love most are perfectly embodied in Boy Scout lore and culture, according to the late Gordon B. Hinckley, who felt if every boy could be a Scout it would empty all the prisons. Unlike the Birch Society, which was never compulsory, just highly promoted, becoming a Boy Scout, and in recent years, becoming an Eagle Scout, is enforced as a required rite of passage in order to insure proper LDS credentials in later dating, mating, and employment endeavors within the Mormon community. LDS colleges and universities actually offer a program in professional Boy Scouting. http://www.ldsscouting.org/index.shtml

Scouting is just the sort of “program” Mormons have evolved and gravitated to in every aspect of their religion. Mormonism in large part is a collection of glorified clerks, bankers, bureaucrats and functionaries who worship the notion that exaltation can be organized, engineered, and manufactured by structuring the perfect universal “program,” and then cramming generations of youth and converts through it to construct a body of believers of absolutely reliable character and totally common experience. Mormons even boast of their leadership as being unexceptional people, common people. In Mormonism there is a glory in not being unusually gifted. Even Mormon leaders are believed to have been chosen because God has called them not because of their genius and personal value, but because they are the most humble of the bunch and the least interested in running the show. The problem with the Mormon approach to Scouting is exactly that. It’s not a program designed to bring out the best and brightest in the best and brightest. It’s a mandatory indoctrination designed to elevate you to the highest degree of youthful glory, exactly like very other good Mormon boy, and prepare you to follow-up your young life’s goal (Eagle Scout) with the next compulsory goal, your mission. And after that a temple marriage and children. And after that you make bishop, or stake president, or even higher church calling, all for quietly doing what you are told and not making waves. This process will repeat itself mindlessly, until Jesus comes and Personally explains what it’s actually all supposed to lead up to.

Because Scouting is now the official Mormon boy’s club, if you aren’t thrilled with tying square knots or having the bigger kids at camp steal all the canoes so you have to walk twenty minutes to meals three times a day clear around the lake while they paddle over easily in a couple of minutes, then it must mean there’s something wrong with you. Everybody else loves it—including “prophets of God” who have not just sanctioned it, but required it of you. In the Mormon world, Scouting is God’s assignment, and if you drop out, you drop out of God’s program.

Scouting organizations outside of Mormonism have severely criticized Mormon Scouting as a “joke,” that “cheapens” the Scouting name. Having seen their complaints from the inside, yes, it’s absolutely true that Mormon Scouting features “merit badge marathons” where its youth go from room-to-room around the ward house, passing merit badge requirements at stations every five or ten minutes. When a Mormon kid gets his Eagle Scout Award, they actually pin the badge on his mother.

http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/01/13/the-merits-of-the-boy-scouts/

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/02/15/34213.htm

http://www.boyacks.com/scouting/

http://reachupward.blogspot.com/2007/10/mediocre-lds-scouting.html

http://www.scouter.com/forums/viewThread.asp?threadID=292052&p=6

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2009/02/scout-sunday/

Scouting’s Godfather, Lord Baden-Powell, apparently idled away his time while the mighty British Empire and all its men, weapons and resources were at "war" with Dutch South African farmers or the odd wild native villager, by writing children’s fables about "Red Indians," trailblazing, tracking, woodsmanship and frontier exploring. As he had begun his military career as a forward scout, in these grand retellings of his adventures and diagramming’s of his scouting skills, he inadvertently fantasized himself into building the secret boy’s club he never had as a child, because his nannies never let him play with the rougher, common boys. Which in hindsight, it appears, he may have had sexual desires for. But perhaps I’m too hard on the old chap. Scouting was a very Victorian sort of British fad and Baden-Powell was just the dashing, repressed homosexual example of the Glorious British Empire to booster it.

And of course, Baden-Powell was a Master Mason, so he had that going for him. Again, the whole Masonic brotherhood scenario is paralleled in the Boy Scout system of mastering skills and gaining knowledge. The same set of religious and philosophical beliefs espoused in Scouting are also common to the writings of the Founding Fathers, the Masons, and Mormon theology. Scouting is therefore just a perfect fit for the indoctrination of the young Mormon into LDS political, patriotic, and religious dogma.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/baden-powell.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA

http://www.glgarden.org/ocg/archive1/baden.html

http://scout.org/en/about_scouting/facts_figures/baden_powell

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7393323/Lord-Baden-Powell-invited-to-meet-Hitler-MI5-files-show.html

Mormons have no active part in Masonry today, mostly because Masons don’t like the way they just move in and take over the lodge. But unlike Christians, Mormons look upon Masonic involvement in the nation as a good thing, not a demonic plot to enslave Christians. Masonry promotes healthy, God-fearing principles. Like the Scouts. In the Mormon world, patriotism, church, the Boy Scouts, holding big conferences, sitting in meetings and forming committees, it’s all a way of life. It’s all the same thing, nothing sinister, nothing all that secret, just organized. Faith must be organized—perhaps a holdover from the Methodist input to Mormonism. In that light, evangelical criticism of Glenn Beck is absolutely correct when his detractors claim he can’t keep his personal religion to himself. Beck can’t do that any more than they can. Not even quasi-Christian political action movements like the Boy Scouts and the late-great John Birch Society could tolerate Mormonism once Mormons actually started making significant operational decisions for these groups. Then the Mormons became a threat. Mormons just weren’t flying the right "Gospel Flag." And still aren’t. And never will.

Robert Slaydon, "Life in the Spirit," from an undated show in September 1988:

"Lots of religious ships are not flying the Gospel flag they’re flying its cousin’s flag. If a ship isn’t flying the right religious flag we’ve got every right to take our nuclear bombs and blown’em outa the water!

A man of God is a man of war! "

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

We have studied all the writings of the prophets and their citings

And we think we’ve finally found just what we seek.

No man can know the day or hour for the Lord won’t grant us power

But we think we’ve finally finally figured out the week.

We all believe the Constitution is the Lord’s Divine solution

But someone said it’s hanging by a thread.

And if she’s falling anyhow, might as well make sure it’s now

That way we can all come out of this ahead.

That’s a little jingle I put together in my youth, to celebrate my years at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah in the early 1980’s. It’s one of many such ditties I wrote for a musical play that will never get produced I titled, Made in Utah. It may have been made in Utah, but it will never get played in Utah. I ran it by a couple of local arts councils who had been under the impression it was a “tongue-in-cheek” look at Utah Valley Mormon lifestyles. Well, I thought that described it pretty well, but it was handed back the next day having had a very good reading at a meeting called specially to give it a listen. “Sledgehammer-to-the-crotch” however, was their impression of it, and so they found it unsuitable. Silly Mormons. What did they know.

Now of course, the biggest new hit on Broadway is a crude little musical written by two arrested toddlers still in the anal stage of comedic development, called The Book of Mormon. The critics are just in love with this thing. I’ve only seen snippets of it, teasers so far. I can’t imagine it’s very accurate overall, it may however be funny, assuming the two authors had a responsible adult on hand with a sense of good taste, unilateral control over the production, and the wisdom to know that incorporating humping puppets and a talking turd into a missionary discussion isn’t just bad form, it’s pathetic and only hilarious to a four-year-old. (I’m just guessing here, but this may be close: “Elder Saltyballz…Oh my God! Moroni’s dead! F**k! Goddammit!” Joseph Smith: F**K YEAH!)

Unfortunately, you can hear many of its mostly foul-mouthed numbers online, and critics have already warned that it is the most profane book ever performed on a Broadway stage. Its general language is beyond obscene, leaving it appropriate once again only to that narrow, but loyal, South Park clientele. Its authors use the same gag over and over—their only gag—where a sweet and often insightful setup is abruptly slapped away with a revolting payoff when least expected. Unfortunately, again, that’s exactly what you expect from them, so you end up just counting off the minutes and wondering how these childish louts are going to make this scenario go all filthy on you, over and over. It gets old in a hurry. It’s that whole insight thing I guess. Tre Parker and Matt Stone never developed a Superego–so they don’t know when they’ve crossed the line because they don’t even know what a line is much less where it might be located.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T31seJmzkg&feature=fvwrel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IjBi1eEaAA&feature=related (Warning: Actual song from Book of Mormon.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8hhIirp60&feature=related (From Book of Mormon.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0_YfOqn7Pw&feature=related (From Book of Mormon.)

Of course, Mormons just don’t have any perspective on themselves in any case, so I suppose if Mormons won’t allow their own witty geniuses to spoof themselves in a clever but fair fashion, in language that is not reminiscent of R Lee Ermey’s performance as a Marine DI in Full Metal Jacket–only set to music and stretched out a couple of hours–somebody outside the Utah culture inevitably has to pick up the satirical Mormon baton and run with it. Mormonism will just have to live with the results. There’s just too much material to work with there to let it languish in that dusty valley. And on the other hand, witty Mormon geniuses don’t get far in the stifling Utah Mormon culture in the first place, because at the bottom of it all, there’s no big cover-up conspiracy—it’s just that most Mormons think Donny and Marie are witty geniuses and musical powerhouses. The sort of Book of Mormon musical Donny, Marie, and their leagues of Mormon showbiz “experts” incubated along the Wasatch Front would have written for the Broadway stage, would have been a glorified assemblage of LDS Roadshow skits that would make the sophisticated Broadway culture laugh alright, but not in a good way. Thinking about that prospect is hilarious on its own: Imagine the Hill Cumorah Pageant with chorus lines and production numbers….

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s07e12-all-about-mormons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtQq-c2LmMg&feature=related (Hill Cumorah Pageant.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UnipVuQdyc (Cumorah Pageant protesters.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOGZPzJEA2k (Cumorah Pageant clip.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUc62jD-G0o (Full Metal Jacket Clip—watch at peril of salvation…)

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005295/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/review-of-broadways-the-book-of-mormon/2011/03/24/ABguJSRB_story.html

http://everythingmusicals.com/everything_i_know_i_learn/2011/03/review-the-book-of-mormon-on-broadway-.html

Folks, I’m just saying this new Broadway hit thing isn’t going away any time soon and there likely be will be more of the same from others who rise to the challenge. Sorry. The Book of Mormon Broadway musical now falls into the Mormon public icon category formerly reserved for the likes of the Osmonds and Glenn Beck. There’s a veritable resurgence of public curiosity about Mormons, and it’s going to be fed by somebody. Mormon culture is a big easy pitching machine that just keeps lobbing softballs gently over the plate and all anyone has to do is step up and start swinging. Parker and Stone are going to be the public face of Mormonism until Mormonism mans-up and does them one better. Any publicity is good publicity. Deal with it.

Just so everyone knows, Glenn Beck is a Mormon. Right now he’s “Restoring Courage” to Israel, as if they need him to do that for them, and last summer he was “Restoring Honor” to Washington DC from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I had a dream” speech, as if they needed him to do that for them. Oddly enough, I had a cable access show in the 90′s where I used a chalk board, drew diaphragms, goofed with Right Wing conspiracy theories, and it looked a lot like Beck’s early efforts–before God took over his programming. It was funnier though. Like my Mormon musical that Parker and Stone swiped, my silly cable show didn’t catch on much.  (Always ahead of my time. I was doing "video verite" or "reality TV" before anyone knew what that was either.) I wish Glenn Beck luck but as I’m often wont to say of Rush Limbaugh: I heard everything he had to say in 1988. In Beck’s case, I heard everything he’s going to say in 1978, when I moved to Provo Utah to go to Brigham Young University.

I had a thing for Marie Osmond when I was younger. It naturally began with seeing her on the Donny and Marie TV show and everyone at church telling me they were Mormons too. It wasn’t intentional, but I ended up in the same festering Utah Mormon college town and found myself standing briefly next to her once before I realized that even saying “good morning” to Marie Osmond was a closely guarded privilege that lay at the end of an Osmond-run gauntlet lined with a whole corps of smothering church and family members who would literally sit you down and interrogate you for simple dating approval–based upon a litany of LDS pre-requisites. Oh, I had all my papers in order so-to-speak, and might have stood up under the white-hot Osmond lamps of inquisition, but the odds were slim I’d make the cut and it wasn’t worth the effort.

I still have a thing for Marie Osmond, it’s just a different sort of thing.

In fairness and full disclosure, my fondness for Marie Osmond effectively ended a few seconds into our first and only chance meeting. In my entire life I only encountered her close-up for about five seconds in a buffet line in a backstage environment. I was alone there, throwing together a quick sandwich as a student crew assistant on a remote video shoot in the lodge at Sundance, Robert Redford’s ski resort, the original small home of the now huge film festival by the same name. I looked up from the cold cuts and saw a very small girl across from me, apparently scrutinizing a single piece of fruit as if debating whether she could get away with eating it without ballooning up and losing her network contract. I said, “Hi,” and then realized it was actually the Great Marie Osmond Herself there. She looked taller on television. I didn’t recognizer her at first, so I must have looked either visibly startled or overly pleased to see her. She looked up and shot a glance over at me with a flat affect, as if to say, who are you and why the hell are you talking to me? Eye contact lasted about a half a second and she walked away without any sort of reply at all. It wasn’t much of a meeting. Maybe I was just too chicken to pursue it, what with her Osmond Mafia goons all around. But I’d seen enough of Marie Osmond to determine that even though this chick hadn’t said a word, she was screaming “high maintenance” at the top of her lungs.

In our few seconds together–and you can call me judgmental if you will–I was actually mildly put-off by Marie Osmond’s general physical layout. She was pretty, alright, a little toothy, pale and emaciated, but nice. She was also just shy of being an actual dwarf. More important than her diminutive stature however, she was wafting around a heavy perfume of non-sexiness that shriveled my private parts like the frosty cold mist of an improvised shower at an Arctic winter camp-out. She carried herself in a way that reminded me of that first cold blast of water that always catches you by surprise when you switch the tub lever from bath to shower.

I tried to console myself that her tiny frame would never be able to pass one of my husky Nordic offspring anyway. Birthing our first big Norski baby would probably kill her. I pondered whether or not my intentions of enthusiastic Viking-style lovemaking would have cracked her frail, bird-like skeletal structure as I attempted to sew my strapping Nordic seed until she begged for mercy and had to be transported to hospital for medical attention. I speculated that once reproduction had been confirmed, in good Mormon-girl fashion, there would be a sudden cessation of purely recreational experimentation concerning the act of sexual congress, until the process of birth had been concluded and the next procreational project was permitted to commence. In the end, I concluded that any effort to effect a loving courtship and establish sexual compatibility with Marie Osmond was utterly academic–however God might have intended to bring us together from clear across the continent, and into this random convergence. This was not fate I told myself. This was not my soul-mate. This was just a very lucky girl who looked OK, sang pretty well, and got a break into showbiz because her big brothers looked cute in straw hats and Andy Williams loved barbershop quartets. Take showbiz away and not much remained in the way of attraction.

Of course, Marie only gave me the same sort of look I or any other average guy routinely got from the little cliques of hot and “popular” babes throughout high school anyway. So whatever her “feck off” look actually meant it wasn’t all Marie Osmond’s fault. There’s still however, a part of me that keeps tabs on her and not-so-secretly cheers her every failure as a small victory for my ego. As I view each of her latest tragedies, I smirk back smugly, thinking I could have saved her from a lifetime of heartache. (As if.) And then there’s the main part of me that only wonders what price I would have had to pay to keep her happy. In the end I just heave a sigh of relief, and take solace in knowing that I’m perfectly satisfied with my 31 years or so of marriage to the same woman, and content that neither of us nor any of our six naturally-hatched kids are anywhere near as screwed-up as the cast of human failures assembled in Marie’s Osmond’s numerous hand-chosen, LDS-approved attempts at making a family. And we did that on honest working man’s wages—not via the fiscal padding of a multi-million dollar-a-year doll shop, an entertainment empire, and a load of in-laws and show-business handlers running our lives.

Happy Mormon peons like me don’t matter to the world, or apparently the LDS Public Relations Department. But for some reason Marie Osmond still does. The LDS culture still prefers to boast itself as a country club for Saints, and not a hospital for sinners. It’s all about selling “eternal perfection.” The more “perfect” you are the more value you have to the organization. Marie Osmond on the other hand, has just gone into her third re-negotiation of “marriage for time and all eternity” and has become a walking pity-party. All LDS PR efforts aside, that’s what the public sees of “official” Mormonism, not the perfectly normal, mostly happy lives of the rank and file membership.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Osmond

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20486972,00.html

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705372424/Mormons–Media-Marie-Osmonds-wedding-day.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1385254/Marie-Osmond-proudly-shows-new-sparkling-ring-surprise-wedding.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1385254/Marie-Osmond-proudly-shows-new-sparkling-ring-surprise-wedding.html

You may remember the “Mormonads” of the peak Osmond era in the late 1970’s and a decade beyond. These were Just happy little Madison-Avenue-crafted propaganda pieces posing as public service announcements, reminding people not to steal from the office, beat their wives or yell at their kids, and urging us all to be nice to everyone. The latest similar effort was pioneered in my area and a few others, and it features usually a seemingly pointless commercial about someone you don’t recognize at all, like a biker or doctor or ethnic musician babbling merrily about his or her life for no apparent reason, and then at the end, the blurt out, “And I’m a Mormon” suddenly, in an almost startling fashion.

Like all Mormon efforts to prove how human and accepting they are now of diverse lifestyles, when you go to this site as a Mormon contributor, you find a rigid matrix of instructions that tightly constrict your input to the project, whereupon a board of moderators filter and approve what actually gets admitted to the array of LDS member profiles open for the public to see. Most of us thought we could pop out the webcam and shoot our own viddy and float it up to the big Mormon cloud for the world to see as an independent LDS statement of faith, personality, and culture. We figured of course some moderation would be in order. Not so. The fact remains that the LDS church doesn’t trust the average Mormon to represent the average Mormon without church leadership telling the average Mormon how to be the average Mormon. Instead of a survey of what’s out there in Mormonism, it’s a chance for Mormons to be taught how to tidy up their own personal ads so they look more like the Salt Lake ideal models.

In truth, the church isn’t interested much in its rank-and-file contributors to the project. In fact, most of what you see on YouTube for example has been professionally shot, edited and scored, and the members featured have been screened for ethnic or popular interest or to spin the surviving pallet of LDS lifestyles available for the public to review in such a way that it most closely appeals to whoever it is they’ve targeted this time as their core demographic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQGuDslF9Uo

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/in-new-tv-ad-campaign-mormons-pitch-message-to-middle-america

http://mormon.org/me/1DT0/James

http://mormon.org/people/

Again, like begets like, and like certainly recruits like. In short, Mormon leadership thinks that recruiting black boring accountants and Asian boring bankers out in the hinterlands to counterbalance their white, Utah counterparts, is what “diversity” means. Mormon leadership thinks that spending 90% of your free time going to church meetings, home teaching, taking your kids to meetings, reading scriptures and watching kids so your wife can go to her meetings and do her visiting teaching, not drinking, not smoking, not swearing, not telling crude jokes or farting in public, but doing all that and riding a motorcycle too, is “diverse.” Look at me, these ads say, I’m a hot young woman, I’m an exotic ethnic mix and I play in a chamber orchestra, and the only way you’ll ever have me as a lover is to join my church and marry me in the temple—but we can make passionate love only in-between meetings and callings and assignments that is, and only for procreation. No fun stuff please. Implicit in these ads is the central statement that, after checking off the list of things I can’t do, and after fulfilling the list of things I have to do first, the Mormon church lets me do this one fun thing too………

The LDS church, simply put, doesn’t trust you to spend your time constructively without constant supervision. The LDS church has been inventing busywork to keep Mormons out of mischief for generations. Busywork is now a central part of the Mormon culture. Unfortunately, most truly creative, productive, intelligent personalities are quasi-anti-social  lone-wolves, fixated, driven, and compulsively moved toward exercising their intellectual or creative muse. The best and the brightest in real life, are engaged nearly constantly in the act of producing good works that are inherent detriments to meeting the official Mormon’s week-long, daily schedule of meetings, priesthood or Relief Society assignments, church sports or social functions.

Hey bishop! I cured cancer last week!”

“Yes brother, but your home teaching is down to 80%, we hardly see you in church, you’ve dropped out of choir, you need to renew your temple recommend, and we’re going to have to put your records on cold storage if you can’t get those statistics up by the end of the month. You need to start thinking about your priorities.”

Nobody in the world today denies that Joseph Smith was a genius of one sort or another. Joseph Smith spent his life pissing of all of Christianity, fighting off mobs, building a major world religion, settling the American wilderness, stick-fighting, wrestling, escaping from jail, raising armies of defense, arguing wild doctrine and Biblical histories while smoking, chewing, and drinking, he make a grab for a few extra wives and then died in a frenzied gun battle. He never once called a meeting to discuss getting home teaching statistics up, or sat in Ward Council pondering how to retain new converts. But wild Joe Smith is no longer the perfect male Mormon model–or rather, Joseph Smith’s image has been feminized, sanctified, sanitized, puttied-over, sculpted and sanded down smoothly over the generations to match Mormon image desired by modern LDS leadership.

In a way, it’s a good sign that after spending millions of dollars and several generations promoting a campaign to enforce the internal and external use of its full legal name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a proof to themselves and others they really are “Christians” because they have “Jesus Christ” in their name, that the LDS church is finally learning that if it doesn’t also protect its nickname brand, “Mormons,” then the public will continue to define the Latter-day Saints by the more visible trappings of other “Mormons” like the pastel bonnets and pioneer dresses worn by snaggle-toothed, butt-ugly, inbred gaggles of old crones and teenaged polygamist wives down in various Texas apostate compounds. If the LDS church doesn’t get ahead of the media curve, “Mormons” will universally conjure up images of a some aging slob in a welfare-supported trailer house complex in southern Utah, grinning on a ratty sofa, surrounded by his happy but mostly fat and boring wives on some MTV reality series as they tell the camera how great their shared husband is, and how happy they are to bring their young, slightly thinner, slightly less-inbred new “sister wife” their third-cousin LaVonne into the family. If Mormons won’t clearly define themselves in a ways that don’t just beg for public ridicule, they will be defined by whatever adolescent crudities the folks like the creators of South Park care to stage in their name on Broadway.

Fair is fair though, and Parker and Stone’s constant allusions to the Donny Osmond being the ideal LDS human model is accurate. Even in this heightened LDS atmosphere of cultural diversification, the unspoken requirement, the implied measuring stick, the true canon for joining the Mormon church, black, white, Asian, biker, banker, tinker, tailor, candlestick maker, remains that if you like the Osmonds, you’ve got the right stuff to be a Mormon. Some people just don’t like the Osmonds. Some people don’t even like Elvis. I don’t like either, but what that has to do with accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Savior is beyond me.

Personally, I’m tempted to create a host site for spoof “I’m a Mormon Ads,” where Mormon trailer trash or Irish Mormon tribal skinhead-types can show themselves dancing a kilted jig on a pub table, or show Mormon motorhead punks street racing and drifting up and down some local town’s main drag, or Mormon Boy Scouts scrambling out of a brawl in a public park, maybe throwing eggs at Donny and Marie posters in Vegas, or maybe even dramatically featuring some Mormon UFC/MMA fighter beating some sweat-splashed opponent into bloody submission, and then have them rise, arms high in victory, mug the camera and say, “And I’m a F***king Mormon.” I’d call it: “I’m a F***king Mormon.com” But that would be in poor taste.

Glenn Beck however, is handily superseding Clan Osmond as the premier world ambassador and leading drama queen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This represents an exponential boost in perceived basic intelligence and general wit of the public Mormon image. Unlike Donny and Marie, the latter in particular, Beck doesn’t have his own private Mormon apostle (Yet? That we know of? ) to write promotional books about him or arrange and perform his several “eternal” temple marriages. Glenn Beck doesn’t talk the Mormon church president into coming out to dedicate his personal media empire. (Apparently in the case of the Osmonds, this was done for the benefit of gathering believers to Zion, and gathering tithing to the church coffers.) Glenn Beck has wisely avoided direct connections to Mormon leadership, and vice-versa. It is possible the latter have learned their lesson with the Osmonds and are now far more cautious about making official connections to those of the entertainment and public personality classes.

Osmond studios incidentally, went belly-up in a year or two after its dedication by LDS church president Spencer W Kimball. This was precipitated when the Donny and Marie show was cancelled due to the public’s general boredom with the two warbling Mormon cherubs. Subsequently, not one of the Osmonds could either think of anything creative to do with all that production capability, or had the sense to hire somebody who actually had a clue, and put their vaudeville money into the projects of somebody truly creative. Like most Mormons, the Osmonds are performers, not creative artists. Mormonism Is big on recruiting sheep to the fold, but sheep have little comprehension of shepherding. When the Hollywood writers, producers and directors left, they had nothing.

As an example to common Mormons, Marie Osmond in her glory days of Provo, made a career out of starvation fasting, fainting to the floor repeatedly like a clattering bag of very small hammers, and being rushed to Utah Valley Hospital for yet another emergency IV. Her mom, Olive, was a jolly, round little woman who’s prolific womb popped out an empire in a few decades on a salesman’s wages plus commission. But Marie spent her life desperately trying not to end up looking like her happy little mother, and went to extreme measures to defeat her God-given genetic programming. She seems to have struggled out three kids on her own by two husbands, and when that paid hell on her figure I suppose, went to buying trophy kids to replicate her mother’s big family performance, without totally wrecking her figure at the same time. In fairness, there may have been some sort of sexual inability or fertility issues there, possibly related to her freakishly small frame and narrow birthing canal on top of an anorexic diet.

I just shake my head and ask myself, How was all that supposed to work out? And of course, It didn’t. When you make it your first priority to pursue a showbiz career in showbiz towns and raise your kids in a showbiz environment, you really have to take responsibility for setting out on an inherently troubled course and thereby transporting your spouse and children through whatever stress or worldly hazards you have delivered them up to. That’s down to Marie Osmond, because she financed the trip and drove the wagon that led into that valley.

Marie Osmond and company, or would that be Marie Osmond LLC…? Anyway, Marie’s personal LDS general authority was unavailable to come back a third time and perform yet another union of what no man can put asunder about a month prior to this writing. As they say in the business world, he’s no longer with us. True, he did pass away in 1998, but he would not have been available anyway. His name was Paul H Dunn and he did however perform the first two “eternal” sealings. Guess the LDS First Presidency had to do the “un-sealings.” And of course, this only means that the first time he tried joining Marie Osmond in a perfect, Celestial union for time and all eternity, his “eternal” seal snapped loose within a year or so. This first “eternal” bond was put entirely asunder in less than three years so Marie could have a second go at it. The second time around, Marie personally chose somebody more worthy of her—or at least a better candidate for kept man and happy house hubby as “Mr. Marie Osmond.” But again this second marriage crapped out a handful of years into it. After a try at reconciliation over another several troubled years, and amid a host of vague allusions to some sinister actions on the part of her second husband, Marie eventually rejected this second perfect and “eternal” union on essentially the same grounds as she rejected her first. Then in an almost bizarre move, with her second divorce barely just resolved, about a month back as I say, Marie returned to her original husband, the man she coyly allowed everyone to believe was cheating on her and heaping “mental cruelty” upon her in unbearable quantities.

I note that on Marie Osmond’s third try—and still counting—at “eternal” marital bliss, Marie had a much quieter ceremony, in the Las Vegas temple—no prophets, no LDS general authorities, no fanfare. She did however with the help of a few opened seams and relieved darts, make quite a show of purging and starving herself back into her original wedding dress–just to show us her priorities are straight this time.

All this speculation and nose-poking may seem unfair, but Marie Osmond made her personal business my personal business when her dad “The George” mostly a real-estate mogul by Provo standards, who made his fortune in the boom days of selling houses to aging California Saints who desperately wanted to retire to “Zion,” created the Osmond burlesque show and sold it to the world as the toothy face of Mormonism. Furthermore, there’s simply something unnatural about maintaining your stake in a meaningless dance contest after your kid jumps off a building and your old man kicks the bucket during the semi-finals. There’s just such a prominent string of fame-addicted weirdness about Marie Osmond that it begs examination. I’m constantly bombarded by well-wishing Mormon she-asses who worship her and marvel at her alleged strength of character in this maelström of crap “happening” around her. They just fail to see that the common element at the eye of this crap storm is Marie Osmond. That’s probably not a coincidence.

There’s something creepy about a woman who sweats and fasts herself into exhaustion just to ace Kirstie Alley out of a gig as diet program spokesperson, claims she’s doing it for her kids and their concern over her health, and then crashes like a sack of spuds to the floor on national television in mid-interview in a dead faint as a result of all this new gained “healthiness.” Most people collect dolls as a hobby, to relax. Most people don’t compulsively turn it into a multi-million dollar business on top of a dozen other high-pressure ventures and then blame their depression on some chemical imbalance due to pregnancy. And then write a book about conquering depression. And then obtusely blame their husband for not living up to some thinly alluded-to moral expectations at the same time you’re confessing to the world you’re a screaming nutcase who abandoned your newborn kid, threw the house keys to the maid and ran off in a suicidal funk to hide in some roadhouse for a couple of months.

I’m waiting for Marie’s new novel about overcoming the death of a child. An Osmond never misses a trick, so that’s the next logical venture. There’s obviously a quick buck in that—and you can always claim you did it to help and comfort others. You can say it was therapeutic.

The Osmonds say the show must go on—but why? Nothing any of them do is of any social, religious, or political substance. They’re in the fluff business. They’re a vaudeville act. They whack each other on the head and shoot seltzer down their pants and get paid for it. They’re the lowest form of entertainment there is. Marie says she has to go onstage because that’s the only thing Osmonds know how to do. If Marie wants to get depressed about something, try that.

And like most Wasatch Front Mormons, particularly those in Utah Valley which remains the multi-level marketing scheming center of the universe, the Osmonds are simultaneously engaged in selling and boostering magic herbs and Australian tea tree oil and any other Word of Wisdom Superiority or Utah-Mormon folk doctrinal snake oil that puts a nickel in the tin cup. In my generation, every Osmond owned a Provo burger joint or some other local business that all went tits-up only to be followed by the next Osmond attempt to prize pocket change out of the local Zoobies that also went tits-up. (Zoobie is Provo slang for BYU students, as in B-Y-Zoo.) This cash-grubbing Osmond carnival act was shilled to Mormon youth and the public at large, by pitchmen like the soon-to-be demoted Mormon apostle Paul H Dunn, who practically toured with them, lived with them, and promoted them in person and in writing like a carnival barker.

When I arrived at BYU I found all the Osmond boys skipping around campus with floopy hair and budding beards. Donny and Marie had a floundering show on network TV. The older singing brothers were washed up as a barbershop act and had to suddenly “discover" their country roots by pretending to be the Oak Ridge Boys–if only they had a bass that is. And if only they were Christians so they could have gone gospel. In either case, I’m sure if had been possible by surgical correction, one of them would have been designated to sing bass by way of surgery. But bass or no bass, they had hair and lots of it. And big bushy beards. That was the new outlaw “Country” look in 1978. Donny, well, he had mutton-chops and a mop-top. Little Jimmy was the Great White Hope, as he actually had a tune on the charts in Japan—which also went tits-up.

While at BYU I spent about every five minutes being bombarded with questions from young women looking to get mated up, wondering where I served my mission. Every bishop on campus was interrogating every unsuspecting Mormon boy who hadn’t served as a full-time missionary as if hellfire awaited those who neglected this mandatory requirement for salvation. Meanwhile, Paul Dunn and others were mincing through Osmond firesides explaining to a Mormon people apparently lacking any sense of irony, how there is no way an Osmond could ever serve as a full-time missionary because they were so famous. This is doubly ironic since Dunn was the darling of the missionary set at the time, and would regale these sorts of youth firesides, missionaries, and missionary recruits with stories of his alleged athletic excellence in pro-baseball. Dunn’s principal anecdote featured some point of challenge concerning his pitching ability, where Dunn is sarcastically asked who told him he could pitch. The punch line was, “Gehrig.”

Of course, Paul Dunn never met Lou Gehrig and never had a pitching career. His insipid prose was inanely popular in books like I Challenge You/I Promise You, a gimmicky little tome in which you had to turn the page upside down to get the promise after reading the challenge. By God’s Grace every copy of his drivel disappeared off the church library shelves about the same time he was quietly placed on “emeritus” status and vanished into the Utah dust somewhere for telling tall tales about his heroic exploits on a famous ball team he was never a member of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H._Dunn

http://www.watchman.org/lds/page1may.htm

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_paulhdunn.html

I’ve got an uncle’s beard in the Smithsonian Museum as the longest one in the world. That’s a “Style all our Own.” While I had to shave my traditional Nordic chin whiskers and bob my hair to meet BYU grooming standards, I was being told that the Osmond lads could never cut their hair because it would destroy their public image and it was required for them to perform onstage with a marketable look. Later in my stay in Provo, while young Mormon women all over campus were being indoctrinated into the joys of being a good wife and mother, the same people were blaming Marie’s Osmond’s first husband for not conceding to follow his working wife around like a good puppy and live out of a tour bus and a string of hotel rooms as “Mr. Marie Osmond.”

Marie’s reclaimed her first as her third husband, let’s just say her latest husband, the mentally cruel one, the one everyone concludes must have been cheating on her–a charge she doesn’t mind letting hang out there—but what’s going to be different? This poor guy was hand-picked and passed an inspection board of family and church officers. It barely lasted a year–just long enough to squeeze out a kid and for Marie to figure out she’s not cut out to be a real Mormon wife and mother. Another year or so of trying to pretend she could hold an “eternal” marriage and family together and still be a star, and Marie was done with it. So was he.

Marie Osmond’s second mate she hand-picked herself. She proposed to him. Then, a couple of actual kids, a bunch of adopted add-ons, and a once-again lagging stage career later, something horrible happened. Like Glenn Beck, with Marie Osmond you’re never sure quite what that big horrible thing is. But Marie didn’t mind going on Oprah or anywhere else to explain just how awful whatever it was was, and reassure everyone that whatever it was, it surely wasn’t her fault. And of course then the rumors about her hand-chosen second partner in marital crime started–cheating, pornography, child molesting, what have you. Marie just let it all float out there to gain sympathy and preserve her market viability. In reality, the guy may have just wanted to have sex with somebody who actually enjoyed it for a change. It could be that simple. Or perhaps Marie’s new pet house hubby got caught looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition to bide his time while she was out being famous and he was left home to change diapers and feed the cats—a serious “emotional” cheating if nothing else in the ever-more feminized Mormon culture.

But we’ll never know, because the two Marie Osmond spouses either just have the class not to shoot their mouths off to the media like Marie “reluctantly” loves to do, or the Osmond Empire has so bullied, bartered and bought their silence that the Clan O can entirely control the public spin and thus preserve the marketability of the Osmond name–which Marie incidentally slapped on her first husband’s kid for a while until it became clear he wasn’t going to be an onstage act, and then it probably became less important for him to bear the Osmond brand. It was later hyphenated into a mess of surnames I don’t care to sort out.

Ultimately, my time with the Osmonds at BYU comes down to this: If Mormon popularity and therefore missionary success is inextricably linked to wearing mutton chops, spangly jump-suits and looking like a gay Elvis, then why wouldn’t you make that the Mormon compulsory “Style all our Own” BYU forces upon its inmates, instead of emulating the GI’s and IBM business–looks that the early 20th century isolated, hillbilly Mormon leadership first became enamored with as modern, sophisticated and cultured, when civilization finally became known in the Salt Lake Valley after the first World War?

I don’t want to give Marie Osmond ideas, but…Kate Gosselin. If all else fails Marie could stay famous by being famous and make people pay to see her doing nothing special other than being famous: Look, I’m buying wet-wipes now. Look, I’m changing into another designer outfit to go shopping in. Look, my kid-wranglers are helping me make snacks out of organic seaweed extract…. Marie Osmond could have skipped all the work and rehearsal and voice training and ended up more popular than she is now. Gosselin is a reality TV superstar. Mormonism has every reason to roll its eyes at Kate Gosselin and think, thank God she’s not one of ours. But compared to Marie Osmond…it’s a toss-up. The only difference is, we got to watch John Gosselin sit on the couch and hear him get bitched and nagged and emasculated into an awkward silence year after year. When John Gosselin ended up on a ski trip with his party girls, the only question I had was, why did you put up with that bitch for so long John?

http://theblemish.com/2009/08/kate-gosselin-is-a-bitch/

http://theblemish.com/2009/08/kate-gosselin-is-a-bitch/

http://www.usmagazine.com/moviestvmusic/news/watch-kate-gosselin-lose-it-during-palin-camping-trip-20101312 (This is priceless.)

http://www.popeater.com/2010/12/07/kate-gosselin-todd-palin-sarah-palins-alaska/

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2010/12/kate-gosselin-miserable-camping-trip-with-sarah-palin/1

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_Kate_Gosselin_estranged_from_her_parents

http://www.tmz.com/person/kate-gosselin/

http://perezhilton.com/category/the-gosselins/

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/09/jon_kate_plus_8_to_dump_jon_be.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/15/kate-gosselins-children-alexis-collin-expelled-from-school-after-hurting-adult_n_796898.html

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b213775_kate_gosselin_kids_werent_expelled_jon.html

http://perezhilton.com/2010-12-15-gosselin-kids-harmed-an-adult

We have more coverage of the Gosselin saga than we need, but you won’t get any similar coverage of the secret Osmond goings-on. You have to guess. You just have to wonder, for example, back at her first, virginal marriage: If Marie Osmond is supposed to be an example to Mormon young women, why was she on the road playing back rooms in Vegas and treading stages made out of converted tobacco sheds in Branson Missouri, trying to save her second-banana career in a struggling solo act nobody cares about, while her new husband the local college basketball star was drinking milkshakes on Center Street in the back booth of Jimba’s on a Provo Saturday night—with an old girlfriend in tow? The Osmondos—as Osmond fans are called—conclude that it’s all down to him. He was cheating on her and he’s the bad guy. I just have to wonder how bad it must actually be to be newly married to someone as cute as  Marie Osmond if you don’t want to be snuffing and pawing around her like a rutting stag day and night. That isn’t normal. What I see in that scenario is a guy who got the old bait-and-switch treatment and in his first year of the “ideal” Mormon marriage, finally realized that he was the one who got cheated. Well, he got a better look at the package than I did. Sometimes you get what you pay for, sometimes not. Caveat emptor–Buyer beware.

But the same people so willing to believe anything Marie Osmond says, also watched John Gosselin get henpecked and whipped as he sat on his hands and bit his tongue week after week down the sofa from his certifiably narcissistic, genetically engineered baby-pimping wife Kate. John sat there taking lash after lash, for not living up to the high standards of performance and obedience Supermom Kate Gosselin demands of all her staff, as she manages the laboratory experiment she calls a “family.” And though it’s easy to see that Kate Gosselin fabricated her additional five children mostly to gratify a grandiose sense of mothering talent, you’ll never convince her female fan base that Jon, the quiet little guy she dragged into her combination side-show, baby mill, and organic pet farm, was anything other than a cad who had no reason to be unhappy with her. Marie Osmond has always enjoyed the same protection.

It always comes back to sex with me. I’m a guy. It’s usually that simple. Kate Gosselin’s the Queen Bitch of Hell. That’s easy to spot. No amount of good sex could ever make up for that problem. But Marie Osmond’s troubles have always been craftily obfuscated. I do know Mormon women a bit however, and in these cases it’s usually some hang-up the woman has about sex or a general inability to enjoy it or be sexy period. And frankly, Mormon men are seldom helpful in making the experience fully enjoyable for their partners, so you have that going for you.

Mormon Marital troubles in particular come also from an inability or refusal to spawn offspring. This theory would explain all the Hollywood-style faddish trophy children Marie Osmond went out and bought. But I don’t know. Nobody will ever know. I challenge you to Google your heart out and you won’t find more than a sentence or two from, or in defense of, or even explaining the perspectives of her ex’es. All you’ll find is Marie consoling Marie. Salt Lake, would no doubt love to enjoy a similar command of damage control in the commercial media and internet blogosphere.

The Osmonds are quick to imply that Satan is working against Marie’s happiness. Yes, the Osmonds intone with Mormony import, the Adversary works against the Lord’s people, and the Lord gives him sway because God knows we grow through adversity…. While this is true, I also assure you boys and girls, brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, that when Satan comes looking to destroy your life, steal your soul and bind your future to hell, you won’t have to seek out some remote crossroads at which to meet him at midnight and negotiate the deal yourself. When the Devil comes stalking your body and soul, he will come to you with contract in hand, singing a sweet song, wearing a pretty dress, and looking a lot like Marie Osmond. You will gladly sign on the dotted line in front of friends, family, and witnesses, and you won’t ever give a thought what the paper actually demands of you until it is too late.

The Osmond defense for telling me I should butt-out is of course, that they never said they were perfect. In all fairness, yes they did. Throughout my entire adolescence they ran a veritable propaganda machine for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that very clearly promised eternal happiness and a Celestial Marriage for time and all eternity, if I followed their example and kept up LDS church standards. The observable fact is, this only seems to have worked out for the male Osmonds, all of whom did indeed select good Mormon wives, and thereafter live typically happy, undramatic Mormon family lives. Marie on the other hand is either secretly the prettiest Osmond brother, or she’s a flagrant hypocrite.

Marie Osmond has never made any attempt to be a standard Mormon wife and mommy. She has always obsessively pursued a life of fame and fortune as a professional working woman. I repeatedly sat in huge, 30,000 body assemblies at BYU in which Marie was no doubt in attendance, where then president Spencer W Kimball and other LDS authorities openly admonished the crowd of young men and women to never let their career or academic pursuits delay or curtail the Divine assignment to become worthy wives, mothers, husbands and fathers. “No other success can compensate for failure in the home,” as the late LDS president David O McKay put it.

The only thing Marie Osmond’s observable lifestyle has shown me is that her LDS faith apparently only insures that you’ll be a sober failure as a wife and mother.

Had Marie Osmond fallen in line with the Mormon Biblical model roles for male and female, Marie could screw up her marriages and families as much as she wanted to and I wouldn’t have a finger to wag at her. But what was good enough for the rest of Mormondom, was not good enough for Marie Osmond. Marie had to do all that and more, with a few million in the bank and her name up in lights. Marie Osmond never stopped being an Osmond, first and foremost–never took the name of either spouse, never tried to trim back her professional aspirations in favor of her family–and by that I mean her husband and own children, something she doesn’t seem to quite conceptualize about marriage. Marie has invariably slighted her immediate family obligations and spousal  loyalty in favor of working toward fulfilling career moves motivated by personal gain, fame, and loyalties primarily to "Osmond Enterprises" rather than accepting her husband as the president of her home and respecting his leadership.

You may remember, when Donny Osmond got married, his fan base evaporated. In fact the Osmondos got violent, and followed his subsequent tour with eggs in hand, usually targeting his new wife in the wings. Marie never really had a fan base apart from being Donny’s sidekick—since country boys like their chick singers “just a little bit skanky.” Even Donny had to dirty himself up a bit and re-emerge as the “Soldier of Love” in the 90’s. But throughout the periods in which Marie simply had no career to speak of, throughout all the years where she could have elected to fall back to her core LDS role as a wife and mother and just quietly be a mom and good housewife, quite to the contrary, she vehemently pursued any avenue of fame and fortune possible, at whatever personal or family expense.

In Utah, where they write all the church manuals and magazines, LDS leadership spends most of its time admonishing the naughty priesthood holder for neglecting his wife and family by spending too much time trying to earn the money they demand from him by Biblical injunction so they can comfortably live the life they expect him to provide for them without any effort on their part. Since Marie Osmond obviously owns the pants in the family even if she pretends never to wear them, here goes a lecture she might get in priesthood meeting:

[Adam’s] statement, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” (Gen. 2:23.) Adam’s statement is wonderfully symbolic of the closeness he felt with Eve.

The covenant between Adam and Eve is summarized in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” [Gen. 2:24] Referring to this scripture, President Spencer W. Kimball commented, “Do you note that? She, the woman, occupies the first place. She is preeminent, even above the parents who are so dear to all of us. Even the children must take their proper but significant place.

“I have seen some women who give their children that spot, that preeminence, in their affection and crowd out the father. That is a serious mistake.” (Ensign, Mar. 1976, p. 72.)

It is all too common in modern times for husbands and wives to place various people or activities—work, recreation, extended family, even Church service—above their marital bond. This is not necessarily a conscious decision. However, the covenant made by Adam and Eve to leave parents and be one teaches us that successful couples will be careful to place each other first. The greatest gift parents can give children is a united and loving marital bond.

Marriage is not just a social contract between man and woman; it involves God as well. God is a witness to all marriage agreements and insists that couples should be devoted and completely faithful to each other. The allegory of marital fidelity in Proverbs 5:15–21 beautifully portrays the blessing of faithfulness to one’s spouse. [Prov. 5:15–21]

18 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.

Col 3:18

4 That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children,
5 To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.

Titus 2:4-5

http://www.ehow.com/how_5305177_love-husband-gods-way.html

http://lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=ec0d2150a447b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1

Part of me feels bad for being so blunt about little Marie Osmond. But if she wasn’t Marie Osmond and just some aging double divorcee from any random LDS ward, every Relief Society biddy in the stake would be picking her to pieces for putting her career ahead of her family. I suppose that’s why Marie is so quick to produce the counteractive charges of some nebulous inability of her spouse to live up to LDS standards. It gets her off the hook with her Mormon base instantly.

In any case, I don’t want a church full of Osmondos. If your primary attraction to Mormonism centers around one family of Utah carnies, you’ve really got no basis for joining. But it’s too late for that. The Osmondos have thoroughly infiltrated Mormonism, and the Osmonds just won’t piss off out of the spotlight and give normal human beings a chance to investigate the church.

Which circles me back to Glenn Beck.

Until Glenn Beck came along, the Osmond Family Circus was the Mormon church’s primary public image. The Osmonds became a world phenomenon at their peak, and still are so some extent–though when Donny’s Soldier of Love came out in 1989, some kid at church asked me, “Didn’t he used to be some kind of Mormon or something?” And that was a Mormon youth in a Mormon church mind you. He and Marie have battled their way back up almost to prime time since then but have hit the exponential wall of a dying fan base. Literally dying. Dead. Old and dead. Nevertheless, the dying Osmond sideshow will haunt Vegas, the TV, and if nothing else, Branson for a long time yet through Donny and Marie and the various spinoff Osmond hatchlings.

But Glenn Beck on the other hand, is on the rise in public awarness, though most Mormons are only now catching on to the fact that Glenn Beck is one of their own. So far, Glenn Beck is hoping to privately slide his devout Mormonism past his public audience issues for a while and I can see why that would be helpful. The second your political opponents find out you are a Mormon they have two hundred years of dried out old anti-Mormon horsepucky to kick around till it obscures anything constructive you might have to offer in a big stinky cloud of poop dust. Obviously I think there’s plenty to be annoyed with in Mormonism–I’ve just wasted thousands of words and killed millions of brain cells exploring Marie Osmond’s foibles and she’s the cream of the Mormon crop. Imagine if you started digging out the real Mormon screw-ups.You don’t need to make this stuff up and nobody should have to waste their time debunking anti-Mormon BS. There’s just so much of it out there and it doesn’t actually do anyone any good at all to rehash it every time a Mormon looks like he’s running for office or leading some public movement.

Ask Mitt Romney. Well, come to think of it, Romney is just an Osmond who can’t sing so don’t waste your time–all you’ll get is platitudes, a big white smile, and a firm handshake. Go ask Glenn Beck. Or Ask harry Reid–though most of Reid’s critics are going to be fellow Mormons. Yeah, he’s one too.

Be sure to keep checking this space because I’m working on something very soon that will BLOW YOUR MIND…!

All Hail the Protestants Part 7: One Nation Under God

Most serious Christian historians today, even many Calvinist apologists, concede that Calvin’s theocracy in Geneva was an example of totalitarian repression, not a model of God’s Divine Government. In Joseph Smith’s time however, many Christians still felt that Calvin’s Church/Police-State in Geneva was a great example for America’s future organization. Even today Calvin’s sympathizers talk about America being a “Christian Nation,” and claim the Bible supersedes the Constitution.

When America’s Calvinist legacy first came upon Joseph Smith, his religious assertions were indeed deviant and unorthodox according to their understanding of Christianity. Likewise, under a Calvinist mandate, so were the Deists and Congregationalists, the Universalists, the Methodists and Baptists that America’s original Puritan stock had sought so earnestly to subdue in their colonies, but could not stifle nationwide in the long run. But Calvin’s disciples weren’t the only sort or “Christians” throwing their formative political weight around in the American Revolution. Under the Calvinist social/governmental model, the very man most credited with insuring religious freedom in America, Thomas Jefferson, was a heretic to be burned even more vehemently than Calvin’s Servetus, and many would have eagerly done so had they been able to get away with it. It is no wonder then, that the Founding Fathers went far out of their way to insure that they had cut Calvin and his thuggish, intolerant legacy off from their openly espoused goal of an American theocracy.

James Madison for one, grew up watching Baptists being imprisoned and persecuted in Maryland as a British Colony under a State religion. Madison was as mainstream a Christian as they came, yet when prompted by a fellow Christian named George Mason, he joined with the radical free-thinking Jefferson and others, and specifically enacted Constitutional provisions to insure that the Calvinist vision of an American theocracy built along the Geneva model would never be possible in their new United States of America.

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
— Thomas Jefferson

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1673.Thomas_Jefferson

Jefferson was accused of being a “Deist,” which in reality is only one of a dozen or so offensive designations you could fling at his personal Christian faith. “Heretic” is the designation his opponents used against him as a candidate for the US Presidency. There were quite a few Deists, Universalists, Congregationalists, and other non-standard “Christians” in the core of American revolutionaries we now call our Founding Fathers. But they didn’t usually advertise it for political reasons—politics driven mostly by Calvinists and other “orthodox” Christians who never doubted that their new United States would be built into another Puritan Paradise like Geneva had been under Himself. (Calvin that is.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

Oddly enough, today, the same Methodists and Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, even good old Roman Catholics and Lutherans, who called Jefferson and his Deist, Universalist, Unitarian or Congregationalist friends heretics, who likewise immediately categorized Mormonism as deviant from their own negotiated American orthodoxy and therefore outside the protection of America’s Christian law, now find themselves compelled to cling desperately to whatever sort of connection these Founding Fathers might have to Jesus Christ. When it’s in their best political interest we see that many of the most fanatically “orthodox” Christians are quite willing to lower their Christian bar of admittance in a most forgiving and inclusive manner, if it means they can thereby secure a firmer historical binding of their “Christian America” argument to those Founding Fathers who were most involved in the actual authoring of the American Constitution.

http://www.creationists.org/myth-of-the-seperation-of-church-and-state.html

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sarah-palin-sparks-church-state-separation-debate/story?id=10419289

http://bmccreations.com/one_nation/nation.html

http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html

It wasn’t just a handful of aberrant, quasi-Christian patriots coming along some hundred and more years into the experiment who thwarted Christianity’s desire to build a New Geneva on the American continent. God was the first anti-Calvinist, anti-Puritan force in the new American wilderness. The first limiting condition placed on Calvinism’s desire to unilaterally rule America came simply as an intrinsic function of America being a huge, wide-open country. God made this wide and wealthy landscape an attraction not only to Puritans and other Christian purists, but soon these zeal-driven pilgrims were being rapidly diluted by multitudes of more mainstream English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and other settlers just looking for a chance to own property and make a good living. Populations spread out into separate, independent towns, homes and farms. American families became independent homesteads, instead of being communally confined to tightly run, desperately dependent walled villages and outposts.

Mormons and Christians alike claim America as God’s choice land—but for opposite reasons. The Christians still think it’s theirs and the Constitution only forces them to be nice to non-Christians and let them come along for the ride as long as they don’t stick their noses into actually governing the nation. The Christians of Joseph Smith’s day in fact, felt they had the right not only to define what a Christian was or wasn’t, but that they had the right to punish those who weren’t, and deny basic rights of US citizenship to those they excluded from the Christian fold. We still see this today particularly on the Islamic front.

Mormons, from Joseph Smith’s day to today, like the Founding Fathers, believe that the US Constitution was inspired to insure that no church could enforce its faith everywhere at all times in the New World. The Mormons of frontier American believed they had as much right as anyone to worship God how they pleased, appoint ministers and church authorities as they felt moved, and most importantly, had every right to form fellowships, communities, and prosper in the new land like anyone else. And even more specifically: vote their conscience unhindered in American politics.

Christian America had other ideas for Mormons, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and God help them, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or whatever other religious and social deviants might try to come along and invade their Christian Nation. Unfortunately for the Pilgrim’s aspiring Puritan theocracy, while the vast majority of initial American settlers came from Puritan or Church of England roots, the Anglican influence in particular faded rapidly and decisively away over their first century in the colonies. The later English settlers carried with them the new King James “Authorized” Bible and a lot of initial loyalty to Church and King, but the good Americans of the Church of England soon found that submitting to a religious franchise held by a King or Queen some several thousand miles away across the sea seemed rather pointless after a while, and there was nothing to compel them to remain faithful to this commitment in the new country. As the nation grew, what really happened is that more and more American settlers came across the Atlantic specifically to get away from the constant supervision of God and King.

The Church of England ultimately could not prevent all manner of American-Anglican offshoots from having their own meetings, conducting their own Bible study, forming their own congregations, choosing their own ministers, and forming their own religious conclusions. These Anglo-American offshoots began calling themselves, like the Scots had done, things like the “Episcopalian” Church. “Episcopal” simply refers to being governed by a council of bishops. A lot of the Scots Presbyterians had already spilt out into Episcopal congregations because they refused to conform to the Church of England’s contention that the King of England was the God-chosen supreme head of the Church, among other issues. Many of these fled Scotland during the Highland purges under George III or otherwise emigrated to America to run their own church and civil affairs as they saw fit.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/timeline/11ecusa.html

Anglican of course means “English,” so in places like Scotland, even in the Lowlands where Scottish nobles had sworn oaths of loyalty to the English Crown, Protestant Scots wanted the English connection diluted as much as it could be from their political and religious institutions. The Presbyterian Church was first founded in Scotland in the mid-1500’s through the leadership of John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation in Scotland. He was vehemently anti-Roman Catholic and highly influenced by the teachings of, yes, there he is again, John Calvin. The “Presbytery” refers to being governed by a high council of priests, even taking a step back from the notion perhaps of being ruled by central bishops and dropping any direct connection to England or the English Church, and very certainly dismissing any authority of the Roman Church. Even so, the Anglicans originally counted most Scottish Presbyterian flocks as “conforming” essentially to the Anglican Communion. This was something James I earnestly tried to enforce. As the generations passed however, Anglo-Scottish relations became less and less cozy. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746 many Protestant Scots could no longer tolerate any English franchise on God on either side of the pond. The largely Scottish Presbyterians who moved progressively into the American south, either went to calling themselves Episcopalian or otherwise explored their own theological ideas and began to be counted by the Church of England as “non-conforming.”

http://christianity.about.com/od/presbyteriandenomination/a/presbyhistory.htm http://www.pcahistory.org/ebooks/pcus/ch1.pdf

This work I must remind the reader, is an entirely myopic exploration of religion in the United States of America with an utterly narrow field of view limited to those Christian forces that directly affected Joseph Smith and the development of Mormonism. It also examines how the rise of Mormonism exposed, and continues to expose, the inherent incompatibility of so-called “Christian” culture with Constitutional Democracy in an American Republic that guarantees freedom of religion. It is not intentionally a one-sided presentation, it is intentionally selective. For you Christians, I assure you I have pissed off far more Mormons than Christians by taking a neutral line through this history. Or should I say, having taken a moral line, a Christ-like line that seeks to examine right and wrong from the standpoint of pointing out guilt where it lies and merit where it is deserved. Having said this plainly, and admitting that it may seem pointless and tangential, my exploration would not be complete without examining Joseph Smith’s exposure to American Lutheranism.

This is a remarkably short encounter.

Martin Luther may have started the whole Reformation movement, and modern Mormons may pay him homage now and again for doing so, but Luther and his followers were one of the last and the least of the influences on Mormonism. All of Protestantism knows and honors Martin Luther as the father of the Reformation. All of Protestantism, all of the Reformationists just plain copied, ripped-off, riffed-on, duplicated, emulated, outdid or otherwise rode Martin Luther’s back into this new Christian age. But Mormons are not Protestants. Mormons are not Reformers. Mormons don’t even know for the most part what a “Reformation” is. Most Mormons think Martin Luther was a black civil rights crusader who got shot in the sixties, and now get yet another day off work in honor of his assassination. Or birth. One of those two. Joseph Smith’s early Christian education included plenty of exposure to Calvinism, Arminianism, some brief skirtings perhaps with Roman Catholicism, but not much actual Lutheran contact at all.

Some say Calvin’s ideas are very similar to those of Martin Luther. The LCMS, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, probably agrees wholeheartedly because out of all the American Synods, it’s the only one left with its heart still firmly residing in the Dark Ages.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ApWxByVqe-MC&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=missouri+synod+history+slavery&source=bl&ots=F_t7GmmPUK&sig=l1-5C2Fbzxyb7DqjVaw8ALxW1Yc&hl=en&ei=FnpYTfveOoiq8AbFl8mhBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lutheranism of any sort was as theologically irrelevant as Roman Catholicism to the Joseph Smith experience until late in his Mormon journey when he moved his church from the eastern states to Missouri, which was newly opened territory. At that time, Smith was trying to escape the mobs led mainly by Presbyterians and Methodists in his homeland of New York, and his first place of flight from same in Ohio. He thought farther West would be a place of freedom. As it turned out, the farther West he went, the farther away he got from any sort of Constitutional protection for his right to worship God as he pleased.

The first Lutheran incursions into what was then the “West,” came when a handful of Saxons got fed up with all the rationalism going on in the 19th century German synods, where the Church was spending too much time trying to make sense out of their religion. In 1838 these Lutheran Puritans left Germany and landed in New Orleans, recently French territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, and steamed up the Mississippi to Saint Louis Missouri. They formed the Concordia Seminary in 1839 out of a log cabin. The Mormons were in the process of getting invited out of the state the whole time the Saxon Lutherans were moving in, and by the time they founded Concordia, Mormonism had been booted out of the state at point-of-sword, and driven off through musket and ball by then.

Missouri’s Lutheran contingent was fresh off the boat, had problems with English, but were very keen on American religious liberty, and unlike the Mormons they found themselves permanently welcome in Missouri by sidestepping a few local social and political issues, like slavery. The Lutherans were also not very ambitious and kept a low profile so they didn’t frighten the locals into thinking they were all going to be speaking German in a few years if they didn’t put these newcomers down right away. But any Lutheran involvement in persecuting Mormonism in Missouri could have only ever amounted to very little. The Missouri Synod did however vote in the Roman Pope as their official nomination for the actual anti-Christ.

(Perhaps that’s where Mormons picked it up.)

The Missouri Synod might have been a problem for Joseph Smith perhaps, but it wasn’t actually formed until 1847, which is years after Mormonism had been burned and massacred out of the state by the general Christian population. By the time the Saxons had built themselves up and formed an actual synod, Joseph Smith had been murdered by the henchmen of Presbyterian,  Methodist, Baptist and other Protestant Christian clergies and politicians across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

As a quick historical orientation then: a year after the Lutherans arrived in Missouri, in 1839, the Latter-day Saints fled the state  under a gubernatorially issued extermination order. They crossed the river to Illinois. As usual, they were ultimately again burned and shot and raped and pillaged out of the city they founded there, Nauvoo. They were then forced to flee farther West. So of all the Christian sects hammering Joseph Smith and his friends either with actual hammers or in doctrinal debate, it would be hardest to determine just how involved any Lutherans may have been. Other Christian sects mind you, proudly rallied mobs and printed their calls for Mormon extermination in the newspapers and openly preached sermons calling for the imprisonment and hanging of Joe Smith, the Great Imposter. Famous Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Christian ministers, priests and pastors published broadsheets and handbills urging violent action against the Mormons. Not so, apparently with the Lutherans. Not even the really really pious ones.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0a4tbtxBOssC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=reverend+pixley+anti-mormon&source=bl&ots=_rpatlclxK&sig=yiT6vpuBiiChf46WcwDGP8gQAME&hl=en&ei=cjazTf_8C4S5twea_4zqDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=reverend%20pixley%20anti-mormon&f=false

In summation, you might think that Lutheranism was almost a non-factor in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. American Lutherans and American Mormons never even had the chance to swing a Bible and each other in the early formative days. However, Brigham Young had no sooner stumbled out of his wagon (since he was sick as a dog when they pulled into the valley) into the dust and sweltering freedom of Mexican Territory–what is now Utah–than he sent out missionaries into Scandinavia, Germany, and Lutheran Europe, where Mormonism converted thousands upon thousands of them–thousands of the most pious and Puritanical of the Lutheran hoards over there. These they shipped, carted and hiked into the Great Salt Lake Valley as fast as they could manage it for about a hundred years. But again, no sooner had these immigrants been gathered into “Zion” as Young called it, than they ceased to be Lutherans or Protestants or Scandinavians or Germans or English or Dutch. They almost instantly became “Mormons.” One of them is the current LDS Church president. I doubt if he even knows what lefse or lutefisk is.

If Brigham Young had one talent, it was Nation Building. You can’t fault him for that.

http://www.valpo.edu/cresset/2008/2008_Trinity_Chapman.pdf

http://www.guidedbiblestudies.com/library/lutheran_missouri_synod.htm

In Missouri, Mormonism also ran smack into the black heartland of the Southern Baptists. The Missouri Lutherans were as Puritanical as Calvin Himself, but the Southern Baptists made it a contest to see just how retrograde Protestantism could be. Luther, most theologians say, was not very different from Calvin in most of  his views. But unlike Luther, we’ve seen the despotism that resulted when Calvin controlled a city. The Southern Baptists, even though they ostensibly sprung from Arminian roots, had evolved over the years of their American isolation into a very Calvinistic sect. They clung to the King James Bible as the sole and inerrant source of God’s religious instruction. Since Baptist congregations are inherently independent, any given ministry could go entirely medieval if they so chose.

http://drjamesgalyon.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/what-should-southern-baptists-do-with-calvinists/

Both the southern Lutherans and the Baptists split company with their northern congregations over the issue of whether or not negroes had a soul and any capability of being saved. (Though both agreed that Jews were Satan’s spawn.) The Missouri Lutherans supported slavery as a tool to convert the heathen and claimed God tolerated it on that basis—God even considered it a benefit to the heathen to be enslaved if it resulted in being saved as a Christian. Northeastern Lutherans and American Lutherans in general had also admitted Negros into their congregations, but only under the assurance that said negroes would not use their Christianity as an excuse to disobey the law of the land and try to escape their obligations as a slave.

Except for the Scandinavian Lutherans who immediately gravitated to the Upper Midwest, American Lutherans were slow to deal with the slavery issue at all. When it became a roaring national and international disgrace around the time of the American Civil War, the Northern Synods took up the Abolitionist’s call. (This was well after the Mormon era in Missouri though.) The Missouri Synod, like the Southern Baptists, being an independent congregational structure, just said, “No Thanks” to Abolition.

The Southern Baptists went so far as to claim that Negros didn’t even have souls anyway so would be pointless converting them. They let their slaves dress up and pretend they had their own Black Baptists churches just to dangle the juicy Salvation Carrot they knew they weren’t eligible for but would work mighty hard to get anyway. Negros in Southern Baptist theology were just going to cease to exist or burn in hell or something when they died. That’s why God created them. God created Negros to be slaves. It was obvious. The Southern Presbyterians would eventually follow the Southern Baptists in this declaration as well.

http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/the_north-south_schism_of_1861.htm

http://www.baptisthistory.org/sbaptistbeginnings.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NXG/is_1_37/ai_94160891/

The Southern Baptist Convention didn’t renounce their racist views on Negros until 1995. The State of Missouri for that matter, didn’t apologize for issuing an extermination order authorizing its good Christian Defenders of the Faith to shoot any Mormons they found in the state on sight, until 1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention

http://sbcvoices.com/southern-baptist-convention-resolutions-racism/

http://www.suite101.com/content/lilbrun-boggs-extermination-order-a62267

The local Missouri “Christian” views on slavery did have tremendous impact upon Joseph Smith’s new church as well as a campaign for the US presidency he was beginning to mount in his last days. Smith’s position on slavery was that he wanted to abolish it but have the US government buy slaves up and free them, thus compensating “property” owners while solving the problem of slavery at the same time. He did allow free Negros to move to Missouri while he was there, and settle, work and worship with his “white” Mormon congregations. This practice of giving any Negros, free or not, houses and paid work and a place in church with white folks was extremely offensive to Joseph’s Christian neighbors. Amongst their many paranoid fears of Mormons was their habit of voting as a block and  buying up all the land in the area so Christian “Old Settlers” wouldn’t have a chance to build rich slave-driven plantations and prosper like their forefathers had done in Virginia and the East. The Old Settlers were in the constant fear that Mormons were educating Negros and treating them like human beings, and this could only result in a slave rebellion led by uppity Mormon Negro agitators.

All of these fears were founded upon the proposition that if the Mormons voted the way they wanted to vote, and kept bringing in the people they wanted to bring into the state, the Mormons would effectively out-populate the older inhabitants, and vote their way into running the place. Unfortunately for the Old Settlers, that’s how America works. That’s how state and federal constitutions are set up. There was nothing legally the Old Christians and their complaining clergies could do about it if Mormons wanted to call Joseph Smith a “prophet” and claim they were going to build “Zion” in the middle of their dreams of plantation paradise.

Baptists were a particular problem for the Mormons in Missouri and Southern Illinois. The Baptists had themselves been driven out of the Northeast early on and made their way south to try to take over what is now called the “Bible Belt.” One Baptist Reverend named Benton Pixley is famous for two things, one he was sent by the Missionary Society to hound Indians from Florida to Missouri into the waters of baptism which most of the Indians resented, and two, he made it his personal mission to dog Mormons to death if he could manage it, partly because they got along so well with the Indians. While Pixley was busy trying to convince Native Americans they were Godless savages and heathens doomed to burn in hell, Joseph Smith was running around showing them a Gold Bible he said was a record made by their ancestors that proves they were the noble descendants of God’s Chosen people. Most of the Indians knew this already in one legendary story or another, and didn’t mind hearing it again, even if it was from some peculiar white guy who was inordinately zealous about showing his admiration for them.

Pixley’s Baptist spiel about hellfire, damnation and a vengeful, white Jesus-God that was going to punish them for all eternity if they didn’t sign up, didn’t play well with the Native population for the most part. Pixley of course, was compelled to try to sell this line of BS anyway, and the Mormons weren’t helping him any with their “Great American Indian Civilization” pitch out of their Book of Mormon. In retaliation, Pixley appointed himself the permanent anti-Mormon correspondent for any newspaper or journal that would publish his diatribes against Joseph Smith. Another local minister, a Presbyterian, Finis Ewing, also published another famous article in the local papers in 1833 in which he pronounced, “The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind, and ought to be destroyed.” But it was Benton Pixley who actually called the meeting that led to the open slaughter of Mormon men, women and children at Haun’s Mill, and the Missouri extermination order of 1838.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0a4tbtxBOssC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=reverend+pixley+anti-mormon&source=bl&ots=_rpauekjyO&sig=to8MJT4VZlY0xM2uivBk1LsePqo&hl=en&ei=KMqzTeuGLI23twfBp9HpDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=reverend%20pixley%20anti-mormon&f=false

With the go-ahead of these “respected” clergymen and many others like them, persecution of Mormons in Missouri commenced immediately upon their arrival in 1833. It came to a head in 1838 after a mob of Christian “Old Settlers” decided Mormons had no right to vote and established a human blockade around the polling place in newly formed Davis County to drive Mormons away. The Mormons slugged their way in to vote anyway, and the Old Settlers ran home crying that they were coming back with guns. This led to the Mormons returning with more Mormon voters carrying their own arms to defend their Constitutional right to franchise. The Christians shot at the Mormons, and unlike the Quakers the Old Settlers apparently imagined them to be, the Mormons shot back. The Christian instigators cried rebellion like stuck pigs to the Governor, and he eagerly issued an extermination order just in time to insure his re-election.

In fact, Smith wasn’t exterminated in Missouri, but one Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill was brutally wiped out by anti-Mormon militias in response to the governor’s authorization, and the Mormons organized themselves in response. They fought off these roving mobs and rogue militias to a temporary truce, based upon a surrender of Mormon leadership. The rest of the Mormons were promised free passage out of the state. What actually happened is they had to abandon their lands and property for pennies-on-the-dollar, or more commonly, most lost all they had to looters and mobs as they went. Smith was imprisoned in Liberty Missouri for five months on no clear charge other than a general claim of insurrection.

Liberty Jail was a dank hellhole. It was a dungeon-like potato-cellar of a “jail,” mostly underground and with no light to speak of. Smith was routinely poisoned or fed tainted food by his Christian jailors and they also teased their prisoners that they had killed either a Negro or a fellow Mormon and fed this “Mormon Beef,” to Smith and his companions.

It is generally believed Smith was allowed to escape Liberty Jail because the entire chain of civil authorities from the governor on down believed Missouri’s charges were going to look foolish if Smith were allowed to carry his defense through the court system, up to and including the US Supreme Court. Smith had in the past humiliated scores of complainants against him, both private and governmental by repeatedly being found innocent of any actual crimes or misdemeanors once charges against him were finally examined under the law. The problem again, is Joe Smith may have been a quack, but he was a religious quack, and if his only “crime” was conning people into believing he was God’s Messenger, then it was no crime at all.

It is also believed that Smith’s Missouri persecutors considered it far easier just to track him down as he fled their captivity and shoot him, than to quibble about why they just weren’t going to put up with Joe and his Mormons, law or no law, in front of a judge in court.

http://www.mormonwiki.com/Liberty_Jail

http://mrm.org/mormon-beef

The truth about Christianity’s persecution of Mormonism, is that it starts with a “Gold Bible” in New York, with folks apparently quite convinced that he had one—they just wanted to steal it from him. And then he started printing these boring “Mormon” books. To finance all of this he started organizing into a regular “church” and raising funds from members of same. At this point, his professional Christian clergy rivals kicked into full drive and began to lecture and encourage public scorn and condemnation, which moved into virulent hellfire death and condemnation sermons, the more Smith’s enterprise prospered in spite of their official warnings against him.

By the time Joseph Smith and his merry band of heretics had been driven into Missouri, they’d been getting mobbed and robbed and arrested and tarred and feathered and beaten up and whipped for decades simply for being unorthodox. The worst “crime” charged against Smith for all of this was that he was a fake. Which again, isn’t illegal in a religious context. It’s not only not illegal, it’s specifically protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Joseph Smith had a perfect right to be a false prophet, a heretic, or a plain-old crank if he felt good about being one and wasn’t physically compelling anyone to join or give him money.

Most Christian apologists go right to polygamy or secret societies of Mormon vigilantes when they try to justify Missouri’s extermination order and related persecution. What actual Mormon historians have to concede is that there really isn’t a single instance of an actual Mormon Death Squad you can nail down for sure, and those with any factual provenance are directly connected with efforts by sometimes very well-meaning Mormons to protect themselves from this ongoing and longstanding onslaught of violence from their Christian clergy-assigned mobbers, rapists, murderers and sadists. And in reality, the polygamy issue was scarcely even known within the upper ranks of the LDS leadership at the time of Smith’s murder in 1844, some six years after the Christian-ordered slaughter of defenseless women and children at Haun’s Mill Missouri, and 24 years after the first round of Christian-clergy authorized threats to brutalize, repress, or kill Joseph Smith. Even assuming Joseph Smith was taking extra wives in his last days in Nauvoo, his attentions to these women was being characterized by his Nauvoo opponents as “infidelity” because the doctrinal connection to plural marriage wasn’t yet being made.

Now, huge mobs led by Christian ministers aren’t the typical response to “infidelity.” The bride’s old man or big brothers might come gunning for you maybe, but never half the state militia on orders from the governor to wipe out your whole village, men, women and children. Or as Christian crusader William Reynolds said at Haun’s Mill just before he put his musket to the head of ten-year-old Sardius Smith, and blew his brains out all over the blacksmith’s shop in which he was found cowering, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.” Another great example of Christianity, Jacob Rogers, riding down fleeing Mormons in the same raid accepted the surrender of an aged man named Thomas McBride. On horseback, Rogers took the surrendered musket, saw it was loaded, then smiled and shot McBride in the chest with the man’s own weapon. McBride fell to his knees with a hand raised in pleading. Rogers took a large bladed corn knife and whacked off his hand in response, then got off his horse and hacked McBride apart bit by bit as he lay there dying. Numerous other fallen Mormons were hacked to pieces as an example to those who would eventually come reclaim their bodies.

http://www.heartslinked.com/peterson_families/ancestors/thomas_mcbride_and_catherine_john.htm

The Christian apologists will try to tell you that men like Reynolds and Rogers were just thugs and scoundrels and freelance ruffians. They were out of control. These sorts of villains were acting on their own the professional Christian excuse-makers say. But no, they weren’t. They were the Missouri State Militia. They were acting upon orders of their governor, at the express demand of Christian clergymen like Pixley and Ewing, with the full support of much of the local press and civic authorities. The same pattern had been repeated all across the US, the mobbery getting worse with every more and more successful anti-Mormon attempt at genocide. The same arrangement was subsequently repeated in Illinois, where the state militia joined forces with an inter-state mob to kill Joseph Smith once-and-for-all. And when Mormonism fled the United States for what is now Utah, Christianity’s mobocracy had gained so much anti-Mormon boldness that it sent an entire uniformed mob army out into disputed Mexican Territory to exterminate them–and of course lay claim to the Intermountain West that the Mormons had just tamed at great cost of life and labor–in the same way that Christian America’s forces of “civilization” stole every scrap of land and property from Mormonism systematically, from New York to Utah, waiting only long enough for the Mormons to produce lands, goods, and property of value, and settlements in productive order enough to be worth stealing.

Joseph Smith’s Christian enemies from the government to the clergy did not scream for his blood because he wasn’t being faithful to his wife. If that were true, he’d only be doing what most of them were doing on the side anyway. In fact, when Smith’s good Christian enemies eventually wrote legislation to outlaw plural marriage (which incidentally wasn’t illegal) they made sure you could sleep with as many women as you wanted as long as you didn’t “cohabitate,” meaning, if you married them and made a respectable arrangement out of it, you went to prison and got heavily fined, but if you took your hat and coat back home with you when you staggered drunk and debauched out of her bed later that night, back home to your wife,  you were fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun’s_Mill_massacre

The Reverend Pixley for one,  makes his complaints against Mormonism very plain, and they have to do mostly with Mormons not participating in his ecumenical councils in the region, and this due to their “un-Christian theology.” He spends a lot of time claiming that Mormons were clannish, pro-Negro, pro-Indian, and in general, a bunch of high-toned Northerners who put on airs and wore shoes even on hot days. Most central to these arguments was his conviction that Joseph Smith’s claiming to talk to God was a heretical fake. And on a personal note, Baptists had been the idiot, bastard cousins of American Christianity for generations. Now that Pixley and his fellows had finally become respectable and competitive at least in the south and western frontiers, even if it was mostly with savages and barbarians, you can be certain Pixley wasn’t going to let a bunch of Johnny-come-lately Mormon heretics thwart the long-awaited Baptist conquest of the United States.

Both the mobs in Missouri, the respected citizens and clergy who supported them, and those in Illinois actually swore oaths to slaughter all Mormons, including many of them signing formal documents and oaths spelling out exactly why they wanted to kill all the Mormons, confessing in writing that the law was on the Mormons’ side but swearing their lives, property, and sacred honor to exterminate them anyway in God’s name, because as they claimed, Mormonism wasn’t loyal to the white race enough, or to Jesus Christ enough, to have been what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set about protecting religious observance. Personally, these sorts of claims really just come down to enjoying your own personal religion and politics, and seem hardly meriting an extermination order. But then, I’m not as “enlightened” as Reverend Pixley and his good Christian fellows.

In Missouri, the written oath the Christian “patriots” took was called the “Secret Constitution.” The Mormons called this document the “Mob Manifesto.” In this sacred covenant, the “Old Christian Settlers” essentially maintained that America was a Christian Nation, that Missouri was a Christian State, and by God no Mormons were going to move in, out-populate and out-vote Christianity as the legally binding religion of the land. The Bible clearly authorized slavery and they weren’t going to mess with that either.

Missouri eventually apologized for its actions in the so-called “Mormon War” of 1838. That’s because the war undeniably started when Missouri Christians formed a mob and tried to prevent Mormons from voting in Davis County. That much just isn’t in question on any side of the debate. They put it down in writing. It wasn’t much of a secret. Likewise, undeniably, anti-Mormon mobs took to the whole countryside raiding and raping and pillaging and burning Mormon property when the Mormons tried to defend their right to vote. That much is also very clear. The rest is history, a history not even the victorious Christians could successfully rewrite or stifle. Though, like Calvin’s defenders, the State of Missouri does a pretty good whitewashing their guilt on their website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War

http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_Danites.shtml#danites

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/mormon.asp

http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~livcomo/letters/mormon.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=P5JBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=reverend+pixley+common+enemy+of+all&source=bl&ots=bnvjvGr0fR&sig=E3_MmMZdYE_2ELekjJ0Xr1j0pUs&hl=en&ei=tEqzTZrvM4aftwf7uYTqDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Originally welcomed as refugees into Illinois, the good Christian elements of that state would not rest until they’d outdone their Missouri Christian cohorts in the high level and low nature of their anti-Mormon persecution and violence. As far as the “Mormon War of 1844” in Illinois goes, this heightened episode of Christian-instigated anti-Mormon brutality culminated with Smith’s murder and the Mormon expulsion from the city they’d just built, Nauvoo, and the State of Illinois. The tenuous “treason” charge Joseph Smith finally got slaughtered for, after surrendering to the governor’s protective custody in Carthage Jail, comes down to the recipient of the bad-end of a city council decision running about the countryside, whining from magistrate to magistrate who repeatedly acquitted Smith, until he got the ear of governor. Seems the little whiner, Francis Higbee, had fired up an anti-Mormon press in the heart of Mormondom and got condemned as a “public nuisance.”

In attempting to get his revenge on Joseph, Smith’s Nauvoo publishing nemesis enlisted his friends in all the regional anti-Mormon newspapers to conduct a unified campaign of editorial haranguings, which prompted a coordinated campaign of over-the-pulpit church sermonizing urging the immediate use of force against the Mormon menace. In this atmosphere of fear and free-license to persecute, roving anti-Mormon mobs began to form, most of whom were indistinguishable from certain regiments of the Illinois State Militia. When Joseph called out the city’s own militia to defend Nauvoo from growing anti-Mormon Christian attacks, Smith’s critics claimed that he had taken over the county and called out the Nauvoo Legion to stifle their American rights. (Apparently meaning their right to mob Mormons at will.) It was “treason” they said. It was essentially the same ploy anti-Mormon activists had pulled off in Missouri. In Illinois however, rather than issue an order of extermination, the governor thought he’d have to calm this uproar down somehow, and decided he’d have Smith sit through a trial at least to sort out the whole treason issue.  Smith would probably get off as usual, or so the governor he seems to have figured, but a trial he thought would mellow out the mobs, justice would have been seen to have been fully served by everyone, and that would be it.

Smith’s old Missouri enemies also swarmed over the border however, and joined forces with the Illinois mobs. Joseph did indeed surrender to the governor as requested, and also disarmed the Nauvoo Legion to reassure the good Christians in the area there would be no Mormon anti-Christian holocaust executed against them, placing the protection of Nauvoo in the hands of the small portions of the Illinois State Militia they considered more-or-less reliable. The units assigned to “guard” Smith in Carthage however, had openly sworn to kill him.

Apparently learning their lesson from Smith’s escape from Liberty Jail, the mob-militia “guarding” Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail just waited till the governor and his main force was gone, stormed the jail and shot him all to hell. They took a moment in the woods to dress like Indians and paint their faces black, returned armed to the teeth, passed undisturbed through the ranks of his “guards” outside the jail, up the stairs to the second floor, and fought their way through the unlocked door of a waiting room where Smith and his fellows were voluntarily holding themselves under arrest. They drove Smith out the window in a hail of bullets. His “guards” outside, shot him on the way down to the paving stones outside the jail. They sat him up against the well he’d landed by, and shot him a few more times just for fun. This got the job of “Christianizing” Joe Smith done with no pretense of a trial or attendant encumbering Constitutional arguments. This avoided the likely chance that the law might let Smith off of this charge like he’d gotten off of every single one of the scores of other legal charges Christian persecutors had tried to pin on him to that date.

http://mrm.org/death-of-joseph-smith

http://historyofmormonism.com/joseph_smith/joseph_smith_life/martyrdom_joseph_smith/

http://books.google.com/books?id=_mBRDOww5h0C&pg=PT107&dq=mormon+war+illinois&hl=en&ei=gkyzTZyHCYK2tgfe8tjpDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=mormon%20war%20illinois&f=false

It just makes you wonder then, why would God choose Joe Smith from some hick town in the American frontier? What chance did Mormonism have to grow and prosper in frontier America’s self-igniting Christian revivalist environment? What chance did a seat-of-the-pants startup utopian society have in a wilderness run by political wolves, capitalist barons, religious opportunists and mobocrats? What chance did an unschooled farm boy have against America’s professionally trained, stump-preaching stormfront of Calvinism and Arminianism? What was God thinking when He came to this young American idiot at this inopportune time and told him to buck the entire social, political, and religious system and “Restore” anything, much less the True Church of Christ? That’s just a crazy idea. The whole notion is preposterous. It could never work. A kid like that wouldn’t last five minutes in that environment, peddling that load of crap!

Right?

You can’t knock success. It’s a mystery. Must be Divine Providence.

All Hail the Protestants Part 6: Born in the USA

American religion evolved primarily out of various Anglified variants of Calvinism. Calvin had almost nothing in common with Joseph Smith theologically, though Smith had been brought up on huge doses of Calvinism. Not much of it seemed to have rubbed off however. Calvin’s offshoot sects like the Presbyterians, came to be be Smith’s political and theological arch-enemies.

Calvin was no stranger to persecution of course, but unlike Joseph Smith he quickly learned how to politic himself into a position of power through stirring up the masses and local clergy to support him. He could also argue his way out of the noose when called upon and barely escaped being branded a heretic himself early on. Like Joseph Smith, he was a self-made “Prophet,” only he didn’t believe in those, or a self-declared “Pope” except he didn’t believe in those either. He had no easy credentials, no “Old School Tie” connections to speak of, no inherent money, lands, titles, legal, political or social power base. Everything he built in his Geneva Empire he pulled out of his own arse and had to create on the spot. Calvin literally created his own theocracy and assumed the role of its Protector for Life. To do this he took an urban wilderness apart at the seams and rebuilt it in his own image. With little more than his own big mouth and clever pen, he ousted political, social, and religious authorities who had ruled the “civilized” world for centuries. You can’t knock success.

But John Calvin beat Joe Smith to the New World, and because Calvin’s theocratic descendants knew exactly what Calvin would be doing if he had been the one founding America, American Christians for the most part just presumed from the start that Old Joe Smith would be attempting to pull off the same sort of theocratic dictatorship. Quite apart from doctrinal differences, this political reality in an American system meant that Christians could not let Mormons participate on an even playing field or they could simply recruit and reproduce themselves into political orthodoxy anywhere they established a social power base. That’s far easier to do in America than it is with an official State religion where Christians could easily define Mormonism out of the entire political and social process. That’s what Constantine did. That’s what Calvin did. That’s what virtually every one of the Protestant Reformers did. How even a hugely Christian majority could do the same thing in a Constitutional Republic with specific Constitutional protections for freedom of worship, became a serious frustration for anti-Mormon Christian crusaders.

Christian America’s reaction to Revolutionary Joe Smith has been from the start, primarily a territorial dispute rather than strictly a doctrinal or authoritarian one. Smith was threatening Protestant America’s ownership of the hearts, minds, and bodies of the New World simply by being allowed to exist. The specifics of his doctrines were only relevant insofar as they could be firmly defined as heretical, and that could have come down to anything from denouncing infant baptism, the Triune God, the Inerrancy of the King James Bible, or any number of pet, historically hot Christian controversies, depending upon which Christian clergy was looking to put down Mormonism.

Joseph Smith’s most offensive heresy however, in the minds of the professional Christians offended by it, was the very notion that some rural hick in his pre-teen years could turn whole populations against thousands of years of conventional Christianity based entirely upon a claim to personal revelation. If the general population was somehow willing to accept that premise, then anyone could worship God however they wanted and could establish by public acclaim any new creed or clergy they felt most comfortable with. The professional American Christian clergy would no longer have a captive audience. America’s up-and-coming Christian ministries certainly couldn’t have that sort of competition going on in their expansive, newly planted American fields of self-imagined glory.

America in Joseph Smith’s day represented the largest wide-open potential Christian harvest in the history of the planet. Those who owned the Christian brand at the time saw that if they did not vigorously–even violently–guard its use, it meant that America would become a place where anyone could come up with a more popular twist on the Bible or religion in general, and freely steal their sheep away. They saw that if they were forced by their own Church traditions to insist upon preaching doctrines to, and haranguing their congregations with dogma that generations of thinking Christians have known to be irrational, illogical, and often just plain asinine, they would never be able to compete against somebody free to deliver a gospel that made sense for a change. (Or at least, made more sense.) If Joe Smith were allowed by “inspiration” to say, no, there’s no such thing as immaterial matter, or that God just exists as a finer form of matter, but neither matter nor intelligence can be created nor destroyed, the fact is, unlike the Platonic, Athanasian, non-God that Christians are compelled to defend, an intangible being who is made of nothing and yet fills an infinitely huge universe, which He incidentally created out of nothing, Smith’s version is going to leave the professional Christian with merely a few obtuse apologies centered around murky mysticism, to try to cover up the clear impression most intelligent listeners would get, that Joe Smith makes absolute sense and his notion of God and physics are apparently scientifically valid.

In frontier America, if anyone was going to be fleecing America’s thriving flocks, it was going to be Christians. Professional, properly trained Christians. Even though the professional Christians in America’s revivalist-driven frenzies at the start of the 19th century fought fervently amongst themselves to define what exactly a Christian actually was, or what the word even meant, they were all pretty certain it didn’t include Joe Smith and his Mormons. Ultimately however, Christianity could not find a Constitutional relief from Mormonism. So Christianity went outside the Constitution and invented a form of Holy Retribution that became known as “mobocracy.” Where Calvin would have simply had the lawmen he owned haul Joseph Smith into the courts he owned, and torture a confession out of him after the Church thugs he owned had beaten him senseless enough, and then Calvin could have executed Joe Smith in a public square that he also owned, Calvin’s American children could only effect the same arrangement by assembling masses of Christian clergy and congregational supporters, declaring Joe Smith a heretic in absentia, and then execute their verdict through an embrace of violence and encouragement to the reprobates, low-lifes and back-sliders within their own congregations, or even unfocussed n’er-do-wells loafing around within earshot, to go enjoy whatever wicked pleasure they might gain from tormenting, sacking, pillaging, raping and murdering the Mormons with the blessing of God, and with full assurance that as non-Christian blasphemers and heretics, Mormons are beyond the protection of American justice. (Like Negros and Indians.)

Where Calvin would have had his own lawmen and politicians openly enact and enforce anti-Mormon statutes by force of arms, America’s career Christian religionists generally had to settle for an agreement from their civil officials and officers of the law to look the other way, or just be out of town that day, as the mobs did the dirty work of insuring Christian control over all civic affairs.

Like Joseph Smith, Calvin made beginner’s mistakes that could have ruined him. For instance, because John Calvin was throughout his religious career essentially making it up as he went, claiming the Bible as his and God’s only authority on this earth, one of his first major religious scuffles before coming to undisputable power in Geneva was with a French refugee, Pierre Caroli, a pastor who was a stickler for “orthodoxy.” In his many lectures and tours, Calvin was always imprecise in his Trinitarian and other “orthodox” terminology. The peculiar Calvinist vernacular he invented became a target for detractors who saw that he didn’t have the Latin Church creeds and related jargon down well enough in their minds to be considered reliably schooled in Christianity. In fairness to Calvin, this is because none of it is actually in the Bible.

Caroli accused Calvin of Arianism and Sabellianism, a couple of old anti-Trinitarian “heresies” supposedly long settled in both Roman, Eastern, Lutheran and most other Protestant circles. Caroli’s charges centered around the notion that Calvin never used the word “Trinity,” he used “Godhead,” and his Geneva Church did not formally subscribe to the Athanasian Creed. The Confession of Faith he forced his entire city to swear to didn’t specifically contain any Trinitarian language either. In 1537 Calvin and his cloister of religious consultants were therefore called before the synod in Bern and back-pedaled their way out of the charge of heresy with some effort and then kicked Caroli out of town and permanently banished him.

I’ve always found this brush with heresy on Calvin’s part amusingly hypocritical in light of the fact that some few years later, after ascending to his throne in Geneva, he would be condemning Michael Servetus to the fire for being anti-Trinitarian, the same charge Caroli used to almost get Calvin burned to a crisp. And if I can compare Joseph Smith just once more with John Calvin, we see that Smith’s biggest sin from the professional Christian’s perspective seemed to be that he just didn’t ever seem to play the Christian game by the established rules. Some rules were just not to be questioned, and Trinitarianism was probably the most sacrosanct of them all in either the Roman or mainstream Protestant traditions. If you could prove your critics and opponents were anti-Trinitarian, it was sure-fire trip to the gallows or the stake—or if you were under Calvin’s rule, he seemed to prefer decapitation with a pretty, ceremonial sword he kept around for the purpose. So, just in example, when Calvin recognized his Trinitarian error, he did not say, no Bishop, it’s just not in the Bible so it isn’t true. He said, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and moved on. (He did not however, go back and amend any of his confessions of faith to include Trinitarian language, nor did he append to any of his theological dogma either the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds.)

Unlike Luther and most other Reformers, Calvin skipped out on his Catholic education and was not at all well versed in the traditions of the Church Fathers and their various creeds. In fact when confronted with the writings of the Church Fathers or Apostolic Fathers by opponents or debaters, Calvin would just say he had the “original” Greek manuscripts, he had the Latin and the Hebrew and could read from the original Biblical authors themselves. Sola Scriptura or the Bible Only was his motto. He didn’t care what some minor African bishop like Augustine of Hippo or some Roman Catholic council had to say about the metaphysical character of Deity back in 326 AD. (I won’t go again into the fundamental stupidity of his assumption that he had the “original” Biblical texts at his disposal.) He did however have the oldest Greek and Latin texts then in existence, and it could be argued that he would therefore be more reliable in his resources than say, the King James “Authorized Version” is then or now. In fact there is an ongoing battle between modern sects who are essentially Calvinist most of them, who view the King James Version to be absolutely inerrant, and a modern class of scholars who in fact take Calvin’s argument and make it a point to catalogue every single error in this inerrant work, based strictly upon how it differs from the Latin and Greek texts it was allegedly taken from.

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-errors-in-king-james-version-bible.html

http://www.bible.ca/b-kjv-only.htm

http://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today

http://www.raptureready.com/rr-kjvo.html

http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume1/tr.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_bibl.htm

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html

The King James inerrancy battle should keep you occupied for a day or so browsing the net for links, if you really want to understand the base stupidity of  Calvin’s claim that God’s Church and the laws of God can be reliably extracted from what we have left of Canonical scripture whatever the manuscript. And when Joseph Smith came up all non-Trinitarian-ish after his First Vision, it wasn’t anything Calvin hadn’t been accused of long before. When Joseph Smith said the American standard, the King James Bible, wasn’t a perfect representation of the original texts, well, Calvin had already been there and done that. The same group of people bashing Joseph Smith on the head with the King James Version back in the frontier era, today now find that Joseph has rather a lot of support coming from scholars and doctors of divinity, and the intellectual giants of Christianity—just the sort of people his detractors claimed Joseph Smith was not and therefore everyone of letters surely knew with absolute certainty that Smith’ opinions about the King James Version were obviously idiotic.

As it happens, the translator of the first Bible in English, John Wycliffe, never fully documented his texts or processes. Because of this lack of scholarly surety, and the fact that Wycliffe was considered a heretic back when the Roman Church ruled England, and thus the Roman Church had put down his pre-Reformation Reformation, his manuscript and most of his copies were destroyed. After that they were too poisoned to be used by any English scholar as a basis for a new Bible anyway. Wycliffe’s English style was obsolete as well. So, the King James Version draws very heavily upon the work of William Tyndale, who’s Reformational zeal to have the scriptures in the common language drew only inspirationally from Wycliffe. Tyndale is claimed to have used only the Latin Vulgate for reverence, and is claimed to have not had access to older Greek text. The “inerrant” King James Version is therefore actually about three translations into it, Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, Greek to Latin, and then Latin to English, before the King James scribes start their job.

It might be noted that although excommunicated by and politically severed from Rome at the time, Henry VIII wasn’t very keen on Tyndale for his efforts at making an English Bible for the masses. Henry also felt Tyndale was cheating the texts into a far more radically Protestant context than Henry felt comfortable with. Like most people who argued with Henry VIII, Tyndale was executed shortly after finishing his work. But then, Kings change and so does the Church. By James Ist’s go at the Bible, Tyndale had already done most of the hard work, thus his being inconveniently dead didn’t slow James I down at all. James I and Parliament were all all by then very happily Protestant as hell, so James didn’t mind any of Tyndale’s anti-Roman colorations. He had his team lose any Calvinistic calls to rebel from the king or Church that Tyndale may have put in the margins or allowed to be translated correctly rather than spun to favor the English Crown. Then James had his team more eloquently paraphrase Tyndale’s translation, while cross-referencing it with the ancient texts. They had a go at some Greek or Latin or even Hebrew in emergencies, compared texts back and forth, polished it all up for king and clergy, and James I quickly had himself an excellent version of the Bible in the modern, educated, “King’s English.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

When John Calvin went at the Bible, he of course had older–and so he maintained a bit erroneously–more reliable texts. He wasn’t even dependent upon a translation. He had access to the oldest texts known in his day. If we concede this is true, then, one must ask, why did he miss the alleged importance of Trinitarian dogma? Calvin’s Humanist education made him quite familiar with the classical Greek logic of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates upon which the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were based. And in fairness to Calvin, when ultimately schooled by Caroli’s little Inquisition he found no intellectual reservations about Trinitarian theology. It’s just that nothing in the Biblical texts ever screamed “Trinity” at Calvin.

To Calvin, Trinitarianism was an extra-Biblical concept upon which he apparently had little or no opinion. Calvin deemed God’s nature of existence or the exact substance of His various manifestations to be fundamentally incomprehensible to the human mind, and irrelevant to the will of God in any case.

Calvin wasn’t preoccupied with knowing the nature of God, just in organizing what His rules were and making people obey them. (Mormons will tell you this is Satan’s plan, but that’s another matter.) Calvin looked at the Bible and Church tradition as a lawyer would, and systematically drew conclusions based entirely upon what he considered to be the most reliable evidence available to him in the Holy Canon.

There is only one other historical document that Calvin claims to have drawn upon in his deliberations of God’s True Will. This is known traditionally as the “Apostle’s Creed.” According to legend, the original of this document was drafted sometime in the vicinity of Christ’s passing from this earth by the Original Apostles. The story goes that they gathered together and each one contributed a portion of their personal gospel knowledge to compile its several statements, or “confessions” of Christian faith.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm

Reliable references to the Apostle’s Creed however, only date back to the time of the Apostolic Fathers, many many years after the death of the Original Apostles. The Apostolic Fathers knew the Original Apostles or close associates of them, and it is possible that it was the Apostolic Fathers who drafted this creed based upon what is now Holy Canon and even from personal memory. Even assuming that it was the Apostolic Fathers and not the Original Apostles who kicked this document off, the Apostle’s Creed, like the Bible, was still clearly never written and published in one complete and “inerrant” edition, because the many well-documented examples of it through the centuries show that it originated as a much simpler document and gradually generated into the form we find it today:

1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:

3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:

4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell:

5. The third day he rose again from the dead:

6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:

7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:

8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:

9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:

10. The forgiveness of sins:

1l. The resurrection of the body:

12. And the life everlasting. Amen.

If we concede that this is the oldest and most reliable confession of Christian faith, then Mormons are obviously Christian. No Mormon would have any problem with making any one of these confessions except for a little leeway in what “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” means in actual practice. This Holy Ghost issue mind you, is something the Eastern and Western Church are still arguing about so the murky relationship between the “immaculate” conception of Mary and this Biblical allusion to the Holy Ghost and Mary “hooking up” in some fashion with one manifestation of God or another to effect her virgin impregnation is hardly a settled matter even in the historically “orthodox” Churches. Indeed, there are whole new schools of Protestant Christian scholars who are even comfortable dropping the entire “virgin birth” scenario based upon obvious errors or manipulations of Biblical texts over the ages designed to bolster this theory rather than just translate the actual record.

The truth of the matter is, the important “virgin shall conceive” Biblical prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 actually read, “a young woman shall conceive,” in literal translation from the much older Hebrew texts. The Greek Septuagint version Calvin claimed to be his “original” texts (not!) substituted “virgin” for “young woman.” It’s no great leap to assume then that the Greek scribes who “translated” what we now use as a New Testament likewise beefed up this “virgin birth” claim whenever they came across the New Testament authors’ allusions to Mary’s conception or Christ’s birth–whether it existed in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts they copied from or not. If for no other reason they would have tended to try to keep this theme consistent by revising the thousands of years of records to plug it in where needed—whether they were just promoting this theory on a personal whim or whether it actually was true. (And I remind the reader that the original “original” texts, the so-called “Original Autographs” do not exist today. We have only the alleged copies of these allegedly original documents, made generations later by Christian scholars and historians in Greek etc.)

This is not my main point here, but I can’t resist the urge to point out that the Biblical “virgin birth” scenario also calls into question other Biblical assertions that Christ came through the line of David, which would have to mean his biological father was Joseph, not the “Holy Ghost,” or any possible “orthodox” variant of some cosmic, transcendent, Triune God-Being. The New Testament authors, as good Jews, obviously felt compelled to give us the paternal family tree of Jesus of Nazareth to fulfill the several ancient Messianic prophecies about the House of David. But in the process they blew a rather large hole in the whole “virgin birth” theory.

Some very clever Mormons out there are now chasing their tails around very self-importantly in a testimony-shaking panic, reassuring themselves from their position of higher knowledge, about “clones” and “supernatural genetic transfers” through the priesthood power of the Holy Ghost as God’s Eternal Agent, which they assume would easily explain the whole virgin birth process. A clone however, would be Mary-plus-Mary, clearly excluding Joseph’s patriarchal and priesthood lineage. Supernaturally transferred genetic material through whatever means, Whomever its Agent, would likewise bypass genetic input from Joseph’s patriarchal line. So you High Priest Groups out there in Orem, Springville and Provo just keep working on it. Personally, I’m not sure it matters much to God but if it makes you happy to speculate upon the practical application of Godly reproduction, knock yourselves out. This is the sort of rabidly marginal inbred Utah doctrinal fixations Mormon detractors embrace as a gift.

Clearly I have gone into a serious digression so I’ll just move on…

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/510316-line-david-contradicts-virgin-birth.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/virgin-or-young-woman.html

http://www.harrington-sites.com/terms.htm

Once again I’m only trying to point out the folly of claiming you can use the Bible and the Bible alone to “prove” what is or isn’t the “truth” with any sort of certainty. If it were that clear, we wouldn’t have hundreds of Christian sects killing themselves off back and forth over basic questions of Christian doctrine for two thousand years, beginning with the question of what is or isn’t “Canon,” what belongs, and what doesn’t belong in the “Bible,” and even the basic matter of exactly how literally this “Bible” is going to be used as a doctrinal guide.

Calvin wasn’t the first to pretend to base his entire theology upon so-called “Biblical Truth.” But Calvin was the first to successfully rid himself of a traditional clergy that would have otherwise bickered and politicked with him over its history and interpretation into some sort of moderation. Calvin was the first to actually sell an entire civilization upon the notion that one guy could deliver God-like Truth and Wisdom just by being clever with the way he gleaned through the Biblical texts.

If you look at the Apostle’s Creed however, and then read the volumes and volumes of Calvin’s own creeds, confessions of faith, and doctrinal theses, you have to conclude that John Calvin gleaned a lot more from the writings of the Biblical authors than those who actually wrote the Bible did. If we assume the Apostle’s Creed was written by the close associates of Jesus Christ within a heartbeat of His being with them personally, and this simple creed, this short statement of faith and brief historical sketch of Christ’s mission is all they thought to pass on to us as a summary of Christian belief, then the results of John Calvin’s deliberations over the Canonical texts show that Calvin had theological ideas that went well beyond the Apostle’s Creed or anything expressly in the Holy Bible itself, whatever its translation.

When Joseph Smith “straightened out” the Bible, he at least had the audacity to claim an angel had told him how to fix it, or that God or Christ or the Holy Spirit or all three at once showed him what the Biblical authors really meant to write instead of what we ended up with. Calvin, on the other hand, like most other Christian dogmatists, rather than revealing great “truths” via direct messages from Deity or other supernatural Powers-that-Be, very clearly drew his “Biblical Truth” from Classical Greek Theism and Western philosophy in general. The rest he admittedly pulled out of his backside with no apologies.

Calvin’s theology comes down to five main points-which incidentally were never written down by himself and presented coherently as five connected points. They were eventually gleaned from his writings and sermons by those wishing to debate him:

Total Depravity:
Sin has affected all parts of man. The heart, emotions, will, mind, and body are all affected by sin. We are completely sinful. We are not as sinful as we could be, but we are completely affected by sin.

The doctrine of Total Depravity is derived from scriptures that reveal human character: Man’s heart is evil (Mark 7:21-23) and sick (Jer. 17:9). Man is a slave of sin (Rom. 6:20). He does not seek for God (Rom. 3:10-12). He cannot understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14). He is at enmity with God (Eph. 2:15). And, is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The Calvinist asks the question, “In light of the scriptures that declare man’s true nature as being utterly lost and incapable, how is it possible for anyone to choose or desire God?” The answer is, “He cannot. Therefore God must predestine.”

Calvinism also maintains that because of our fallen nature we are born again not by our own will but God’s will (John 1:12-13); God grants that we believe (Phil. 1:29); faith is the work of God (John 6:28-29); God appoints people to believe (Acts 13:48); and God predestines (Eph. 1:1-11; Rom. 8:29; 9:9-23).

Unconditional Election:
God does not base His election on anything He sees in the individual. He chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will (Eph. 1:4-8; Rom. 9:11) without any consideration of merit within the individual. Nor does God look into the future to see who would pick Him. Also, as some are elected into salvation, others are not (Rom. 9:15, 21).

Limited Atonement:
Jesus died only for the elect. Though Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient for all, it was not efficacious for all. Jesus only bore the sins of the elect. Support for this position is drawn from such scriptures as Matt. 26:28 where Jesus died for ‘many’; John 10:11, 15 which say that Jesus died for the sheep (not the goats, per Matt. 25:32-33); John 17:9 where Jesus in prayer interceded for the ones given Him, not those of the entire world; Acts 20:28 and Eph. 5:25-27 which state that the Church was purchased by Christ, not all people; and Isaiah 53:12 which is a prophecy of Jesus’ crucifixion where he would bore the sins of many (not all).

Irresistible Grace:
When God calls his elect into salvation, they cannot resist. God offers to all people the gospel message. This is called the external call. But to the elect, God extends an internal call and it cannot be resisted. This call is by the Holy Spirit who works in the hearts and minds of the elect to bring them to repentance and regeneration whereby they willingly and freely come to God. Some of the verses used in support of this teaching are Romans 9:16 where it says that “it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy“; Philippians 2:12-13 where God is said to be the one working salvation in the individual; John 6:28-29 where faith is declared to be the work of God; Acts 13:48 where God appoints people to believe; and John 1:12-13 where being born again is not by man’s will, but by God’s.

Perseverance of the Saints:
You cannot lose your salvation. Because the Father has elected, the Son has redeemed, and the Holy Spirit has applied salvation, those thus saved are eternally secure. They are eternally secure in Christ. Some of the verses for this position are John 10:27-28 where Jesus said His sheep will never perish; John 6:47 where salvation is described as everlasting life; Romans 8:1 where it is said we have passed out of judgment; 1 Corinthians 10:13 where God promises to never let us be tempted beyond what we can handle; and Phil. 1:6 where God is the one being faithful to perfect us until the day of Jesus’ return.

http://calvinistcorner.com/tulip

Chronologically tag-teaming Calvin was the second major influence upon American frontier religion, the Dutch Reformer Jacobus Arminius. http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Heritage/Arminius.htm Arminius was born a few years before Calvin died and studied under Calvin’s brother-in-law in Geneva. He started his career as a staunch Calvinist Reformer but after a while noticed a few problems with Calvin’s Biblical and logical conclusions. It was mostly Arminius and his followers who started breaking Calvin’s teachings down into the five points he most emphasized because it was those five main points they disagreed with so much.

http://christianity.about.com/od/denominations/a/calvinarminian.htm

http://www.ondoctrine.com/10armini.htm

http://www.tlogical.net/bioarminius.htm

In a nutshell, Arminius came to argue:

• Humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation (see also prevenient grace). They possess free will to accept or reject salvation.
• Salvation is possible only by God’s grace, which cannot be merited.
• No works of human effort can cause or contribute to salvation
• God’s election is conditional on faith in the sacrifice and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
• Christ’s atonement was made on behalf of all people.
• God allows his grace to be resisted by those who freely reject Christ.
• Believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace through persistent, unrepented-of sin.^[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminianism

Generations later, Arminius’ theology came to be incorporated into the tenets of Baptists, Methodists, the Congregationalists in early New England colonies, the Universalists and Unitarians. Even a few “liberal” Southern Presbyterian congregations allowed some Arminian teachings—much to the chagrin of the Anglican Communion. The Smith family was associated with most of the above, particularly the Congregationalists, Universalists, and Methodists. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife’s family were staunchly Methodist.

it was Arminian theology in particular that fueled the revivalist flames that created Joseph Smith’s so-called “Burned-Over District” in upstate New York. Christ’s “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16) to take the gospel to the world was pretty pointless to the Calvinist, because God, in Calvinism, had already chosen those He was going to save and this election was assured and irresistible, and not based on merit at all anyway. Believe or not believe, confess or be baptized, it didn’t matter in the end. It was really all down to God, not you. The Methodists however, were driven to sell the sinner on the idea of repenting, since they believed it was the sinner’s choice to make. Salvation to the Methodist was dependent first upon you exercising your free will to accept Jesus.  And after that, Methodists were also fervently engaged in making sure they didn’t “backslide” and lose their election as they, unlike the Calvinists, believed to be possible.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+28%3A16-20&version=NIV

“Methodist” was originally an epithet used by Oxford students to describe the methodical way founders John Wesley, a professor there, and his younger brother Charles, had formed a “Holy Club” on campus to organize their lives. George Whitefield soon teamed with Wesley and introduced an animated form of open-air “revival” preaching to their club. Their original intent was a reorganization of the Church of England, but the whole “revivalist” approach infected branches of it to the point that they began to be called “Methodist.”

Wesley was very Arminian but Whitefield gravitated to some seriously Calvinist ideas as their church spread around Scotland and the British Isles, which strained their relationship. It was Whitefield however, who convinced Wesley it was not immoral to preach outside a consecrated church structure and brought the gospel message to all classes high and low, including labor castes who were until then outside the central focus of the Church. That’s not a particularly Calvinist approach mind you, and I can’t really account for Whitefield’s motivation for the populist, egalitarian overview of his Christian mission.  Whitefield was instrumental in founding an independent sect called the Free Church of England which ultimately led to an entirely separate Methodist church.

Whitefield first brought the notion of revivalism to the American colonies and fired up the First Great Awakening. When Whitefield died, Wesley, who outlived him, was free to take Methodism in an entirely Arminian direction with no further in-fighting from Whitefield. It’s this Arminian message in the Second Great Awakening, Joseph Smith’s time, that set the Methodists apart from the Calvinist pack as something new and exciting. The Methodists opened up the American religious playing field and the rest had to scramble to keep up with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodism

http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_methodism.htm

While the Puritans of early America were certainly exposed to the thoughts of all the central Reformationists, including Jacobus Arminius in the Netherlands, Zwingli in Switzerland or even the German primo-heretic Martin Luther, they were addictively attracted to the brutishly simplified teachings and extreme disciplines of Calvin. Calvinists believed prosperity was always an indication of God’s favor, and hardship was always the result of sin and faithlessness. They believed that personal sin could bring God’s punishment upon the whole community and people required constant supervision and chastisement. Conversely, they also believed that hard work and faith was always rewarded by God. These concepts are inherently schizophrenic when objectively reviewed.

Calvin himself professed to believe in the “Priesthood of all Believers,” yet the purest descendants of Calvin’s religious machine, the Presbyterians, count Joseph Smith as an archetypal heretic because he claimed his authority without religious degrees or titles. “Who is this Joe Smith upstart?” they asked when he appeared in the thick of the religious scene of his day, telling them they had it all wrong. My Lutheran ancestors of course asked the same question about Calvin, when he did the same thing to Martin Luther’s followers back in the Old Country. My Lutheran relatives have described Calvin as an impertinent, egocentric despot who never finished a seminary class, never took a vow, and was never ordained by anyone of any authority to teach anything other than Legal Humanism. And that only in French.

Who the hell is Joe Smith? Who the hell is John Calvin? I could fairly reply. Thomas Jefferson asked himself the same question and came to conclusion that Calvin was Satanically inspired fool.

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

Jefferson, almost as Joseph Smith was kneeling down in the woods to confirm his own dubious assessment, of period Christianity, was also writing this:

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820

For a sample of the philosophical nonsense Jefferson was describing as the Platonistic, the “Classical” or rather, “Pagan” foundation of Calvin’s God, here’s a segment from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online:

          

  

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/K113

http://books.google.com/books?id=5m5z_ca-qDkC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Plato+if+it+is+conceivable+it+is+possible&source=bl&ots=a3wqQSbc7C&sig=gWZBzy9EVDqGC_DY3P19RAMc_kI&hl=en&ei=oZqYTaKzDcyL0QHNzInvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Plato%20if%20it%20is%20conceivable%20it%20is%20possible&f=false

Regardless of the Biblical translation then, the Reformers and the Protestants, just like their Roman predecessors, were all decoding Biblical texts from their slightly varied but still narrow perspectives as products of a Hellenized, Greco-Roman, Western civilization. From the early Church Fathers and before, Christian scholars, Roman, Eastern, Protestant and Reformers alike have been trying to make Biblical texts support conclusions about the nature of God that Classical philosophers had long taken for granted as logical and thus true. The “Jesus of the Bible” or the “God of the Bible” was invented by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and their Pagan Greek philosophical fellows. The writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were simply jiggered and interpreted hundreds of years later to make them seem to support the established “science” of these Pagan philosophers.

The Church of England’s Westminster Confession of Faith, negotiated in 1646 for example, describes God as “without body parts or passions.” This is a concept of the Supreme Being the Pagan Greeks and other Western philosophers had formulated generations before Constantine and his Nicene Council first codified it into Christian dogma in 326. When you start from this Pagan assumption, and you then examine God’s Biblical dealings with man through the relatively narrow and scarce Biblical texts that have survived, it is very easy to produce the sort of absurd, even cruel and arbitrary God that Calvin invented for himself. And again, in fairness, though Calvin and his fellow Reformationists were all claiming to be using the “Bible Alone!” as their sole source of wisdom, they were in fact also simply plugging generations of written and unwritten base assumptions from the corrupted “Church” they were rebelling from, automatically into Biblical verse. They used base assumptions from their admittedly corrupt “Church Tradition” to fill in the holes and answer questions the Bible itself didn’t even come close to answering.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Creeds.html

Contrary to the Pilgrim’s Puritan claim on America as their ultimate Calvinist free-fire zone, the actual Fathers of the Constitution were some of the first Western philosophers and religionists to actually look at the Bible without preconceptions and allow themselves to evaluate its provenance, historical and literary value dispassionately and realistically—apart from the thousands of years of Christian mythology and the fabled Church histories surrounding it.

Thomas Paine was one of the chief authors and instigators of the American Revolution. Like Jefferson and others in their circle of American visionaries, he had religious notions that drew serious rebuke from most of his Christian countrymen, authoring amongst other works, The Age of Reason, which was called by his detractors, “The Atheist’s Bible.” His main approach illustrated a modern, critical Biblical scholarship that was generations ahead of its time, though common today.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html

Both Paine and Jefferson expressed sentiments that could very easily be put into Joseph Smith’s terms: The Church had fallen apart and the Bible was never intended to be the last word on the subject. In other words, all three of these American patriots were saying that the Church had not been either Providentially preserved from, or inspirationally Reformed from heresy and fatal collapse. The the Bible was never a complete “How To” manual left directly from the pen of Jesus. Christ had never intended to leave a Biblical record in total perfection specifically to save the Church from error, so the boast that mankind didn’t need anything other than the Bible to run society in Christian harmony is ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson even edited his own version of the Bible, removing the parts he said were idiotic or anti-social, illogical, demonic and dangerous to the nation.

Yes, Jefferson was branded by many a heretic. It was a serious detriment to his political aspirations. However, Thomas Jefferson went on to found the nation and became its president in due time. Joseph Smith on the other hand, got shot down like a dog by an angry mob of Christians.

Timing is everything I guess.

And then again, Jefferson never claimed to talk to God and Angels. Jefferson never tried to found his own church and muscle in on Christianity’s piece of the American pie.

All Hail the Protestants Part 5: In God We Trust

It is the undeniable truth that Calvinists took over England, and through English colonization, Calvinism was the main religious force in opening up the North American continent, specifically those colonies who later became the United States of America. What Calvin’s modern fans try to obfuscate however, is the fact that the small group of truly great thinkers who authored and crafted the US Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights where the relationship between religion and State authority was cleanly severed, were in truth a coven of dissidents reacting directly to Calvinistic oppression and abuse of power. They had seen it historically on two continents for many generations. For this reason, the Founding Fathers incorporated protection for all religion in the Constitution. They also limited government from taking a position on religion at all, other than acknowledging the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creator, Who grants all mankind its universal rights.

From the birth of the Church of England to the American Revolution, the State enforcement of Christianity had been seen by America’s Founding Fathers to be, a capricious and bloody disaster. After Henry VIII, the Church of England had first undergone a violent flip-flop back to brutally enforced Roman Catholicism with the short-lived “Bloody Mary,” Henry’s daughter. She died mercifully prematurely in her reign, and from then on the Parliament became over-run with Protestants eagerly driven to force Roman Catholics out government, the court, and ultimately all of England if they could manage it. They rapidly codified anti-Catholic laws including the proscription of Roman Catholics from ever taking the English Crown again. This power-hungry English Parliament looked over the channel in Europe, and jealously spied Calvin’s incredible control of every aspect of Genovese society. They soon adapted themselves to exploit Calvin’s whole approach.

In 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate the Scottish Throne because she was a Roman Catholic.  Scotland had been forcefully aligned with England and politics had gone all Puritan on her. Her heir and son James, had been raised a Protestant. He met the new Protestant requirement to take his mother’s throne, but James was only 13 months old however. Several regents ruled on his behalf while he grew up. Before he ascended to his kingly duties, he took to travelling Denmark and Norway to learn the sport of witch hunting, which was immensely popular in Scandinavia at the time. He was a very active participant in these trials and punishments, and in one famous case testified that the witches involved had cast a spell of bad weather that was intended to sink his boat and prevent his participation as he travelled to the court. He authored a little book on the subject titled Daemonologie  in 1597, which became something of a handbook for witch hunting fanatics.

James I (Known as James VII of Scotland) practiced his witch hunting hobby as the Scottish King a while. He took a Danish wife while he was at it. Inevitably his mother was executed as a threat to English Protestantism by Elizabeth I. This cleared the way for him to take the English throne without dispute, since unlike his mother, James’ religion was all in order and he had a proper Protestant spouse to make proper Protestant heirs with. He united the two kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1603 as James I of England, when Elizabeth I died childless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England

http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-witchcraft-and-witches.htm

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/james-I-witchcraft.htm

In 1605 a Catholic soldier named Guy Fawkes, supposedly guarding a pile of firewood underneath James’ first parliament as English king, was discovered to also have a pile of powder kegs nearby with which he intended to blow up the entire government. After that, James forced English Catholics to swear an oath of loyalty and deny the supremacy of the Roman Pope over English law. He was quite friendly to them afterward however.

http://talesofcuriosity.com/v/GunPowder/

James I also tried to conform the Scottish Protestants as closely as he could to the English Protestants. This annoyed the Scottish immensely. Part of James I’s problems with the Scottish had to do with the Scottish Reformationists claiming way too much independence from the English Church, of which he was now the head, and resting way too much authority on the scribblings of John Calvin. Of course, as already noted, in reality James I had begun his King’s career in Scotland as a back-woodsy Calvinistic Puritan like all the other Scottish Protestants. When he came into the English Throne however, all his witch hunting and whatnot alienated the English Court’s more cosmopolitan, educated Puritans who considered him to be unsophisticated and superstitious. But James I was well thought of throughout his kingdoms, and he made many important cultural and religious “advances” at least from the English, Protestant perspective.

In 1607 a group of settlers sailed from James I’s England and founded the American colony of Jamestown in his name. This entrepreneurial venture became the toe-hold of the Church of England on a big new continent.

http://www.historyisfun.org/jamestown-settlement.htm

James I gave us the era of William Shakespeare. He fostered art and architecture, music and social progress. He brokered something of a peace between Catholic and Protestant, England, Ireland and Scotland, and he sponsored the translation and publication of the Bible that would become the New World English Standard, his “Authorized Version,” which was first published in 1611.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version

Oddly enough, neither the Pilgrims, other American colonists, or the common English used their king’s “Authorized Version” until around 1651, some thirty years after he made it available to them all. Until around that period, the Geneva Bible was used in the home. This had been compiled in Geneva in part by Calvin’s brother-in-law, as headed up by English refugees from Bloody Mary. It was finally published and Dedicated to the new Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I in 1560.

The Geneva bible was flamingly anti-Roman, something the Anglican church had no quarrel with, but it was also flamingly anti-authoritarian, something the English Crown had issue with. So the Bishop’s Bible was used in church.

This Bishop’s Bible wasn’t the first English “Authorized” Bible. In 1539 Henry VIII ordered Thomas Cromwell to supervise Myles Coverdale in producing the English Great Bible, so-called because it was huge. It is sometimes also called the “Cromwell Bible.” It was also very expensive. It was a clergy-only authorization not meant for the masses. Because Henry VIII grew impatient with the scholarship and tedious deliberation involved, Coverdale ended up basically ripping off the work of William Tyndale who Henry had branded a heretic and traitor, and executed three years previously. Coverdale took Tyndale’s work and removed the objectionable anti-Catholic and anti-authoritarian marginal notes, consulted the Latin Vulgate and various German translations and made editorial corrections for political and dogmatic reasons to keep his king happy. He did not spend any time at all looking at any ancient Biblical texts. The result was clumsy Olde English and would be scarcely understandable today.

Another irony of the Great Bible is the fact that Myles Coverdale in 1535 had already published the first complete English Bible. The Coverdale Bible, unlike other English translators, included the full New and Old Testaments. Like the Great Bible, it was based on Tyndale and German translations. So it is important to note that the Great Bible was very specifically published by the Church of England for some very specific editorial reasons not at all related to scholarship or accuracy. Henry VIII already had an excellent English complete Bible from Coverdale. He wanted one like it, but spun to his own purposes, as supervised by his Vicar General Thomas Cromwell, to insure the resulting volume met the express interest of supporting his king as the sole Defender of the Faith. Not the Pope. Not the Bible. Not John Calvin. But Henry VIII, King of England.

http://smu.edu/bridwell_tools/specialcollections/prothroexhibit/english27.htm

http://www.chaplain.us/Bible/bible.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bible

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English_Bible_translations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverdale_Bible

It could be fairly claimed that all of these translations served one political or theological purpose or another rather than represented true and accurate preservation of Holy Writ. But when the Geneva Bible made the Holy Scriptures available in common English vernacular it became immediately popular with the common folk. It was very much a Calvinist document however, a movement that hadn’t yet been smoothed into existing Anglican doctrines maintaining the unilateral Church authority of the English King. Unlike Calvin’s Calvinism and the masses who actually might like a little Biblical anti-authoritarianism, the Church of England and its heads of state didn’t like using a Bible infested with Calvinesque marginal notes authorizing rebellion from Crown and Church. Calvin encouraged slaves and servants to choose God over their masters, and a host of other dangerous free-thinking intimations. So in 1586, under Elizabeth I, a council of bishops produced yet another Bible based on William Tyndale’s work. This again is ironic, since Tyndale had only decades before been arrested by Henry VIII and imprisoned for over 500 days in filthy conditions until he was nearly dead. Finally Henry invented some feeble evidence and Tyndale was convicted of heresy and treason in a contrived trial and then strangled and burnt at the stake in the prison yard on October 6, 1536. His last words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.“

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/william-tyndale.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/geneva/Geneva.html

http://biblehistory.ca/article.php?fragid=22&year=1568

For James I’s Biblical mission, he didn’t have to worry about Henry VIII’s fondness for all things Roman Catholic, that had passed from the Anglican Church in no uncertain terms. But when he left the Scottish rabble and became an English king as well, it became a problem of uniting the equally rabid English and the Scottish Protestant factions not against a Roman Pope, but into agreement upon the sovereignty of the King of England as head of both Church and State. That just wasn’t an easy proposition. English Calvinists brushed over rather a lot of Calvin’s views on rather a lot of Church-State issues because they didn’t fit the Anglican foundation. James felt he had to insure this Anglican power base would be observed throughout his kingdoms. This meant he had to mount yet another Biblical rendition that either left all the politics out, openly supported his role as King and Church Head, or the very least, walked that fine line between a sort of neutral accuracy and asking for trouble. Again, he used Tyndale’s work as a centerpiece. His team would go back to the oldest known manuscripts and attempt not just a literal translation, but something that captured the majesty of the Word of God, something everyone could not only read and enjoy as literature, but a Bible that would exclude all marginal interpretations and leave it to the Church (Him as its head) to do all the interpreting.

And the rest is history…

Backtracking the English Bible even farther however, to be fair, the first first delivery of the Holy Scripture to the English masses of course, has to be credited to John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was such a prolific religious idea man and academic genius that he, not Martin Luther, is lauded by the scholarly as the precursor to the Reformation Movement. He was in fact, a Reformer before the Movement caught up with him. He professed that the Bible should be an open possession of the Body of Christ, not a secret collection of scribblings in a language the common population couldn’t even read. He was embarrassed that English nobility read the only common-language Bible they could easily get in French, the only other available being the Vulgate, which was in Latin, which by that time was no longer a common language and was used only by academics and the clergy. Wycliffe instigated an English translation from the Latin that resulted in English versions of the New Testament and an edited, more readable edition of the Old Testament that had been already finished, by Nicholas of Hereford, all of which was again edited and revised by Wycliffe’s associate John Purvey in 1388.

Wycliffe’s pre-Reformation Reforming led to his Roman Catholic opponents saying, “The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity.” And in Wycliffe’s time, Rome was the only game in town. The Roman hierarchy attempted to completely exterminate Wycliffe’s work, but about 150 manuscripts still remain. Tyndale was indeed inspired by Wycliffe’s efforts, which is but one more thing that put him at odds with Henry VIII. Henry VIII did not look at Wycliffe as a Reformer. Henry VIII was the only Reformer Henry VIII needed in his Court. Henry VIII saw Wycliffe as a rebel and troublemaker who in the end was declared posthumously a heretic, excommunicated, dug out of the Church’s Holy Ground, and dumped ignominiously into the local river. Just to make sure he stayed dead, his writings and books were all burned and declared heretical and banned.

http://www.tlogical.net/biowycliffe.htm

At any rate, 1653 brings us to England’s first full-bore Calvinist witch hunter and overall pompous English bastard, Oliver Cromwell. By by 1653 Cromwell had promoted his exploits killing Catholic Celts on the battlefield into a high position in Parliament. He then overthrew King Charles I, had him executed for ostensibly for seeking help from a Catholic army during the battle which Cromwell sold as treason, dissolved Parliament, dissolved the monarchy, formed the “Commonwealth of England,” and installed his own “Barebones” Parliament consisting of hand-picked ministers.

Oliver Cromwell was a distant relative of Thomas Cromwell, the man who’d found Henry VIII the legal and doctrinal excuses for taking over the job of English Pope. Henry had taken Oliver’s kin to the heights of power in his Kingdom, but Thomas eventually found his English Reformation plans put on hold as Henry cut off his head. It seems Parliament thought he was getting too big for his britches and convinced Henry Thomas Cromwell had to go. His kinsman Oliver obviously figured out how to prevent that from happening again by killing the king first, and taking over Parliament himself.

Oliver Cromwell was a truly raving England-First Puritan who professed that God guided his every move. And being a true Calvinist to the core, he had no use for a monarchy pretending to be the head of the Church, and he had no need for a professional clergy to tell his Parliament how to govern English society.

When Oliver Cromwell quoted the Bible it was the full Calvinist Geneva Bible mind you, not the King James Version. Cromwell was all about doing God’s will as he saw fit and any one or anything that encumbered this mission was eliminated. Cromwell had won brutal battle after battle in his campaign against Scottish and Irish Catholics, and even formed a violent aversion to his period Scottish Presbyterians who refused to conform to his English Church and legal systems. He knew what was best for them and he was damned well going to force them to accept it. After conquering them all, he declared himself  “Lord Protector of England, Ireland, and Scotland.”

Cromwell’s army slaughtered more than forty-percent of the native Irish population for refusing to renounce Catholicism, and drove by force the remaining indigenous population to County Connaught, with the Act of Settlement in 1653. His treatment of the Irish has been categorized by historians as “genocidal.” Even the Scottish Presbyterians had been fighting for a Stuart restoration to the Scottish and/or English Throne, in the person of Charles II, but Cromwell easily and brutally put down both Catholic and Protestant supporters of the Stuarts.

The only thing Oliver Cromwell hated worse than Catholics was heretics and traitors. The only thing he hated worse than heretics and traitors were witches. And be slaughtered a lot of each.

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell.html

http://www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon48.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell

Cromwell’s Commonwealth died with him and the monarchy was restored in 1660 with Charles II, who dug up his bones and hung him by his shroud at Tyburn, except for his head which was cut off and displayed outside Westminster Hall. For the most part his ethnic cleansing of the Irish and gloating victories over the Scottish combined with his furious Calvinism still to this day overwhelm any contributions he may or may not have made to English society.

The English Crown in the 18th century diminished into something close to a “Super Minister,” and almost a figurehead that Parliament could listen to or not. But though a figurehead, the king remained an important figurehead and led by example if nothing else.

In 1745 “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” Charles Edward Stuart, Scotland’s last Stuart pretender to the English and Scottish thrones, returned to Scotland from his safe exile in France, and led a  Jacobite or “Highland” rebellion that recaptured his Scottish throne. This surprised everyone including his loyal followers. The English were taken aback and in a state of panic. He then stupidly insisted upon taking on his claim to the English throne. That didn’t go so well for him.

http://www.britishbattles.com/battle_of_culloden.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden

Invading England and capturing its capitol city was not an entirely idiotic notion. The Scots were actually doing quite well at first. (And of course they had God on their side…) The English Parliament even fled town and the entire government was essentially in the process of abandoning London to the oncoming Scottish forces. In the last push however, Charlie got spooked, received some bad intelligence and became convinced a huge force was just waiting for them a few miles closer to their goal. He turned tail and retreated back up into Scotland to have a rethink.

George II of England couldn’t believe this stupid move, thanked God for such a stroke of luck, took advantage of the time Stuart had granted him to rest, rally, and reorganize his forces. Then he sent the Duke of Cumberland chasing backup to Inverness with his best and brightest to solve the Scottish Catholic problem once and for all, in the same way Oliver Cromwell had solved the Irish Catholic problem generations before.

On April 15, 1746, Cumberland’s army faced off with the last Stuart claimant to the English throne with cannon, musket, and sword at Culloden Moore in northern Scotland. When he was finished, there wasn’t much left other than carnage and bloody tartan. He followed up the Jacobite slaughter by systematically burning out the entire Highland population. Likewise, by legal proscription, rape, pillage, and mass murder he drove out or effected the near genocide of the Highland Clans. The Jacobites were mostly Catholic, mixed with a smattering of Scottish Episcopalians, who had splintered from the Scottish Presbyterians because they wouldn’t conform to the Church of England’s guidelines. I mention this again because it isn’t coincidental. This butchery didn’t take place because of simple politics. It was a religious war. It was Christians killing Christians because they disagreed who should be running the Church and State.

(So in one-thousand seven-hundred and forty-five years since the birth of Christ nothing much had changed.)

As usual, George II mainly ended up the King of England because he wasn’t Roman Catholic. George II’s father, George I had been imported from Hanover, which is now in Germany, even though there were English and Scottish heirs with perhaps better claims. The British Isles contestants were all Roman Catholics or had Catholic sympathies.

George I spoke very poor English. He was regarded as a bumpkin and a foreigner by Parliament, and turned out to be far more conciliatory to Roman Catholics than they’d imagined he would be. Undaunted by his efforts at moderation, Parliament continued to enact anti-Catholic measures that grew increasingly oppressive. The English public never warmed up to him either, and it was said that his heart was never in England, but Hanover.

As a young heir to the English throne, George II came to heated debates with his father over the dangers of allowing Roman Catholics to undermine the English Church and State by allowing them power and position when they were forsworn to a foreign Pope. This was an attitude that carried over to the American colonies and remained stalwart amongst the Protestants in the United States of America until about 1960, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, was elected president midst much the same objections from opponents over his allegiances to Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy)

Over these Catholic conspiracy issues and other matters of governing England, George II became enraged at his father in public one too many times, and was banished from Court till his father passed away and he took the throne in 1727.

Unlike his father, George II spoke fluent English and was a gung-ho Calvinist. He refused to go back to Hanover for his father’s funeral and this little gesture of contempt won him the approval of all English society. His slap-down of the Jacobites at Culloden was the last pitched battle ever fought on English soil. Protestantism had unquestionably been secured in the British Isles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_II_of_Great_Britain

http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/hanover_2.htm

But a pitched battle was brewing on American soil at the same time. In 1776, George II’s heir, King George the III, ultimately lost the American colonies. I leave you to sort out the reasons for this heated move to independence by the English colonists. There are a lot of theories, but a look at actual history will tell you it had as much to do as a whiskey tax and a beer tax and the price of tea, as it did with securing religious freedom. And perhaps the Calvinists were right in the end: the exercise of bashing Bibles back and forth for so many centuries eventually beat some sense into America’s head.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom

America had begun to realize that religious liberty wasn’t liberty at all unless all individuals were allowed to debate and investigate their own understanding of religious truth, and were then free to observe these beliefs. America had also learned from Calvin’s oppression, that religion wasn’t worth anything if you could not enjoy the fruits of your own labors. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness may not be in the Bible, and happiness may not even be pious, but it wasn’t a bad as it was cracked up to be. And perhaps America had even learned that it was none of the local church biddies’ business if you wanted to dance, or sing, or fart on your own doorstep. In America, a man’s home truly became his castle, and that made him head of his own church in his own home.

John Calvin may have been given credit for founding the hardworking American ethos. But he taught God’s truth by bad example. America learned the value of true religious freedom by suffering the lack of it under Calvin’s colonial hell on earth.

http://bustill.blogspot.com/2008/04/religious-intent-providence-politics.html

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=5153