Posts Tagged ‘Church of England’
Mormon Wars Part 3: Hillbilly Rednecks
In every case of bona-fide Mormon “outrage” against Christian antagonists, the actual record proves that the Mormons were the original injured parties, that they were only guilty of re-action, and in every case, this reaction became necessary only because civil protection had been denied them and they were left to fend for themselves. So they fended. Sometimes not so skillfully, sometimes not so fairly. Often not so calmly.
Sometimes not very rationally.
Still, even “neutral” historians constantly feel obligated to point out that many of these Mormon reactions to Christianity’s non-stop persecution were over-reactions, and sometimes this led to collateral damage against innocent parties. No dispute there. Valid criticism. From the perspective of a minority community being systematically tormented, and when viewed within the context of a continual struggle against an openly hostile surrounding culture possessing superior numbers and openly avowing the death and destruction of Mormonism and all its adherents, men, women, and children, it must be conceded that it would be easy for the Mormon community to “over”-react to threats, real, and imagined. For instance:
Bill for Removing of the Press of the “Nauvoo Expositor.”
Resolved by the city council of the city of Nauvoo, that the printing office from whence issues the Nauvoo Expositor is a public nuisance; and also of said Nauvoo Expositors which may be or exist in said establishment; and the mayor is instructed to cause said establishment and papers to be removed without delay, in such manner as he shall direct.
Passed June 10th, 1844. Geo. W. Harris, President pro tem.
W. Richards, Recorder.
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 284
Why did Mayor Smith and his city council think the Nauvoo Expositor a public nuisance? Apart from the lame serial dramas, the bad poetry features, and poor writing in general, is had been established right under the nose of Joseph Smith by several apostate Mormons who’d been excommunicated for wanting to set up their own franchise on multiple wives–only they didn’t want to actually marry any of them, and though they were claiming they had it, they certainly didn’t think they needed Smith’s approval. It was the Nauvoo Expositor’s only mission to harangue Joseph Smith particularly over the plural marriage issue, call him names, make charges of villainy and pretend he was behind the sex orgies and covert assassination squads its founders had been excommunicated for attempting to set up in the Mormon community under his name. Any other content in the rag was an exercise in vanity on the part of the contributors, and scarcely journalism anyway. And yes, they were “exposing” some sensitive doctrines about plural marriage Smith didn’t want publicly explored yet, and certainly not by a group he’d tried to rid himself of, and who now were deliberately attempting to twist a touchy doctrinal revelation before the public via the most unflattering and distorted characterizations of plural marriage a group of whore mongers, abortionists, lechers, and thugs could contrive. That sort of thing emanating from the capital of Mormonism could get a lot of Mormons killed.
O
r at least, that was obviously the essential opinion of the Nauvoo City Council.
The press was destroyed and the type was melted in a bonfire in the street. Was that an over-reaction? Perhaps. But not considering that anti-Mormon presses all around them were bringing death and persecution already, and one more from the heart of Mormonism would only add credibility to the already dangerous hyperbole being used against the church.
Was the Nauvoo Expositor’s destruction legal? As a zoning matter, yes, marginally. Was the "public nuisance" legal ploy used Constitutional? If proposed as a zoning issue, perhaps yes, in the same way you might ban whorehouses or sex shops or gun and whiskey stores near school playgrounds and so forth–in which case the Expositor’s company would simply be free to set up shop outside city limits. But, as Joseph Smith replied to this line of inquiry:
…In relation to the press, you say that you differ from me in opinion. Be it so; the thing, after all, is only a legal difficulty, and the courts, I should judge, are competent to decide on that matter. If our act was illegal, we are willing to meet it…
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 437
http://www.archive.org/stream/risefallofnauvoo00byu2robe#page/n3/mode/2up
The old Christian settlers and their apostate-Mormon enablers replied to this reasoned appeal to the law by shooting Joseph Smith all to hell before he could get into a courtroom. Joseph Smith had a habit of winning these sorts of legal challenges, from New York to Illinois, year after year, case after case. It was easier to just kill him than risk another loss. I’m not guessing. This is what was openly boasted by the mob before they murdered him. Then they raided, beat, pillaged, burned, tortured, shot, stabbed, and cannonaded their way through the rest of the local Mormon population, systematically, until they had all been killed or driven into the western wilderness.
So, you tell me. Who really over-reacted?
The question is, why were Mormons hated and persecuted? Was it really brought upon themselves via their overtly evil practices? Did their peaceful, God-loving neighbors spontaneously rebel against their tyranny in an attempt to liberate themselves from despotic Mormon oppression? Christian apologists will keep trying to sell you on that concept. But that’s not what history shows. History reveals a preponderance of evidence suggesting that Mormons are a very accommodating and industrious people. History however, also shows that if you heap enough crap on a Mormon he’ll eventually get fed up and kick your ass. And then he’ll want to keep kicking your ass until you aren’t a problem for him any more. All that proves is, Mormons are human beings.
The question again is, why did Mormonism’s frontier neighbors want to heap a load of poo on them in the first place, and just who was doing it?
Two simple answers: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christians were persecuting the early Mormons, and they were doing it for two reasons—religion and politics. In the mind of the WASP, or really most any other period Christian however, that’s only one reason. Christians have always believed that religion and politics are inseparable, and that the arm of civil law must necessarily be expressly Christian to protect and enforce their Christian faith. In more liberal, even “mainstream” Christian sects today, this notion has been all but abandoned in favor of an almost equally self-hating and suicidal sense of “political correctness” that puts dog-worshippers, Satanists, Islamo-Jihadists, or GLBT neo-Pagan druidic sodomites on the same moral level as any of the Christian sects—with the exception of course of Mormonism. In that case, Liberal and Moderate Christians still choose to hate Mormons because they dare maintain that donkey-lovers and sexually altered sodomites don’t deserve the same rights to adoption and marriage as good Christian men and women do, and hold other “intolerant” social views about “negroes,” or so they believe. But even today the bulk of the Religious Right mentally screen and edit the inspired words of the Founding Fathers, and deduce that the Constitutional authors had always intended to form a nation built upon a document designed to protect American Christians from the polluting ideas and practices of the infidel. If you want to make some equivalent charge against the Mormons, if you want to claim that Mormonism is all about forcing an exclusive LDS theocracy upon the United States and the world in general, you’re fighting a litany of canonized LDS expressions of loyalty to the US Constitution and its principles. A simple Google of Mormon patriotism will instantly produce volumes of open, pluralistic professions of respect for Jeffersonian religious liberty from Mormon leadership, spanning over two centuries of their church.
As I have said to you before, so I say again, the Constitution of the United States is a great and treasured part of my religion, and the revelations of the Lord and the words of our inspired leaders compel it to be so. The overturning, or the material changing, or the distortion of any fundamental principle of our constitutional government would thus do violence to my religion.
God grant that this people shall never give the lie to Brother Brigham, and that ever and always "the Elders of Israel will protect and sustain civil and religious liberty and every constitutional right bequeathed to us by our fathers."
–J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Stand Fast by Our Constitution, pp. 8-9
I have ranted frequently about the “Secret Constitution” of the old Christian settlers in the Mormon persecutions and expulsions from various counties in Missouri–including expulsion from one established specifically for Mormons by the state legislature, Caldwell. A “Mob Manifesto,” and an Extermination order from Missouri’s governor are hard to defend even today, even by the most apologetic Christian apologists. (They give it a good try anyway.) But it is seldom mentioned by Mormon or anti-Mormonist alike, that a similar, highly organized, Christian, Darwinian democracy-styled resolution was drafted by some nine counties around Nauvoo. These Christian patriots in southern Illinois, in the name of American liberty, drafted a compact, like their brethren had across the river in Missouri, issuing a demand for total Mormon expulsion from the state, under a bit more carefully worded threat of extermination, but a threat nonetheless. Christian mobbers had by then of course, learned to be a little craftier at the tactics and language they used, to give their “spontaneous” mob violence and predatory, pack-mentality the sweet smell of law and order. In the Illinois version of deputizing the anti-Mormon mob, the first step was to repeal the Nauvoo City charter, which they pulled off in 1845, less than a year after murdering Joseph Smith. This removed from the Mormon community any legal standing to act in their own defense. As unincorporated land, Nauvoo and environs were stripped of a police force, local courts, local government, and most importantly, the Nauvoo Legion, which was a legislatively chartered city militia. Nauvoo was at that point dependent singularly upon the good graces of the County Sheriff for their only legal protection. The State Attorney, Josiah Lamborn, commented on this maneuver in a letter to Brigham Young:
I have always considered that your enemies have been prompted by political and religious prejudices, and by a desire for plunder and blood, more than for the common good. By the repeal of your charter, and by refusing all amendments and modifications, our legislature has given a kind of sanction to the barbarous manner in which you have been treated. Your two representatives exerted themselves to the extent of their ability in your behalf, but the tide of poplar passion and frenzy was too strong to be resisted. It is truly a melancholy spectacle to witness the law-makers of a sovereign State condescending to pander to the vices, ignorance and malevolence of a class of people who are at all times ready for riot, murder, and rebellion.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
http://books.google.com/books?id=PMAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=the+rise+and+fall+of+nauvoo&source
Vol. ? Friday, March 20, 1840. No. ?For the Register.
THE MOBBING SPIRIT OF MISSOURI REKINDLING IN ILLINOIS.The following is a statement of facts that may be relied on:
A short time since it was ascertained that a Mr. Clark, a member of the Methodist Episcopal church in Logan county, had in his possession the Book of Mormon. For this glaring outrage he was severely reprimanded, deprived of his station as a class leader, and the book demanded of him by his preachers, a Mr. Martin and a Mr. Watt.
He (the said Clark) contended that the book was his own property, and unless they bought it, they could not have the same. Accordingly, the necessary sum was raised, and paid for the book. Shortly after the said book was taken into De Witt county, to a Quarterly Conference meeting, there to await its final trial, and it was condemned, and burnt to ashes — the judges themselves being the executioners. And what is still more appalling, Mr. Watt, a preacher, has been heard unblushingly to assert, that if burning the book would not do, they would next burn the Mormons themselves. If testimony is required on this subject, it can be had at any time. AB’MPALMER.
Springfield, Ill., Mar. 12.
The Christian mobocracy had already secured the loyalty of most state and local officials before assassinating Joseph Smith. Some of it was willing, some of it reluctant, some active and some just key conspirators looking the other way at just the right moment. But there was one frustrating
exception; the County Sheriff, JB Backenstos, who insisted in upholding his oath of office, much to the mobocracy’s consternation. The Christian mob had however, insured that their version of the “truth” of their past, present, and future violence against the Mormons would get to the federal government, by electing one of Smith’s murderers, an indicted, first-hand participant in the Mormon founder’s execution via lynch mob at Carthage, to represent their state as a US Senator. State Attorney Lamborn had a bit to say about that as well:
Your senator, Jacob C. Davis, has done much to poison the minds of members [of Congress] against anything in your favor. He walks at large in defiance of the law an indicted murderer. If a Mormon was in his position, the senate would afford no protection, but he would be dragged forth to jail or the gallows, or be shot down by a cowardly and brutal mob.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
The next thing the Hancock County Holy Conspirators did was rally a mass meeting of Christian crusaders at Quincy, 22 September of that year. In spite of frequent small-scale mobbing, looting, burning and other intimidations, Mormons were still hanging out in Nauvoo. They had committed to complete their first major temple before they left it to the heathen to be defiled, and in the meantime were using it to initiate and “endow” as many of the Saints as possible with covenants Mormons take upon themselves in the course of educational theatrical sketches essentially, stories told in formalized, ritual ceremonial form, which occur therein and only therein. An ad-hoc mob committee had already demanded to know the intentions of the Mormons remaining in the vicinity. The Mormons responded that their desire was to simply live in peace, but ultimately the entire body of the church had plans to relocate in the West. The Quincy committee issued a resolution on 24 September, containing a number of clauses, all of which demanded that the Mormons had to leave in the Spring, and that they were not to be allowed to prosecute criminally or civilly any accused old Christian settlers, and that these old Christian mobbers were to be allowed to return to Mormon areas, unmolested and unprosecuted for any crimes against the Mormons they admittedly may have committed. Josiah B Conyers, who wrote A Brief History of the Hancock Mob, commented on the first of these clauses:
The first one, in our opinion, is unique. They accepted and recommended to the people of the surrounding counties to accept an unconditional proposition to remove. But understand, Mr. Mormon, though we accept it and recommend the surrounding counties to do so likewise, (reprobate you, unconditionally) we do not intend to bring ourselves under any obligation to purchase your property, or to furnish purchasers; but we will be very kind and obliging, and will in no way, hinder or obstruct you in your efforts to sell, provided, nevertheless, this shall not be so construed as to prevent us from running off the purchaser. But we expect this small favor of you; viz., that you must dispose of your property, and leave at the appointed time.
–History of the Hancock Mob, Conyers, pgs 13, 14
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 353
The Quincy anti-Mormonists concluded their meeting by drafting a general military strategy for the forceful removal of Mormonism from their God-given lands. They appointed the leadership of a sizeable military contingent also organized thus to meet the challenge of violently contending with any Mormons foolish enough to linger or dawdle past their deadline.
As I have implied, the Quincy committee then met with a similar group at Carthage, and together rallied an even larger convention which was held at Carthage, comprising religious, law enforcement, civil, militia, and volunteer forces from all nine surrounding counties. The Carthage assembly adopted all the principle resolutions of the Quincy gathering, adding a litany of crimes and outrages charged against most of the Mormon leadership by way of justification for said expulsion of all Mormons from the state. There was one further enablement they demanded:
Resolved, that it is expected as an indispensable condition to the pacification of the county, that the old citizens be permitted to return to their homes unmolested by the present sheriff (Backenstos,) and the Mormons, for anything alleged against them; any attempt on their part to arrest or prosecute such persons for pretended offenses will inevitably lead to a renewal of the late disorder. [Meaning wholesale riot and warfare against the Mormons.]
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 354
Having thus named Sheriff Backenstos personally, it was assumed he would back down from the nine-county threat. It was also moved that WN Purple, judge of the judicial circuit court be “requested” to withhold the fall session in Hancock County, on the grounds that opening the Mormon complaints against the old Christian settlers would again, result in open mob violence against the Mormons, so it was for their own protection. In this manner, Christianity had castrated the Sheriff, and if he dared arrest any of them, he now had no court and no judge to drag them to anyway. The only justice in southern Illinois was the mob.
The scene was brightly set for unfettered Christian fury to be released upon Mormondom, but that pesky sheriff, Backenstos, wouldn’t back off. And even in the regular State Militia’s ranks, the Mormons found many strong defenders. On 11 February, 1846, Brigham Young, the Twelve, and the High Council, made a show for the mobs of crossing the Mississippi on a fortuitous coating of ice, and made camp in distant Iowa. By the last of April, the main exodus had begun and the great majority of the Saints had vacated Nauvoo. Rather than easing the anticipation of the Christian defenders of liberty, and with the blessing of regional clergy, the mob saw no point in making even a token offer for what they could easily take by force, or inherit by default, simply by driving off the now greatly diminished body of Mormon stragglers.
An Illinois State Militia Major named Warren was commissioned to supervise Hancock County during this forced emigration process. He maintained peace with an even hand, but his orders had expected him to retreat from the vicinity once the main move had been completed. This news, he noted, was obviously of great anticipation amongst the old Christian settlers. He advised the governor that there was still a fair Mormon presence in the area and the wolves had begun to circle around them. His orders were changed to remain in defense of those Mormons who were attempting to pack up or sell the abandoned Mormon property. The problem was, a fair contingent of Mormons were to old or ill or broke to brave the trip immediately, and others had hoped to remain till the end of the summer to consummate their large number of pending sales and other business transactions, and protect personal, civic, church and communal property until it was sold or carted out. This short delay was too much for the old Christian mobbers. Again, they fell back into their old tricks of instigation and intimidation. Major Warren felt it necessary to put the mobs on notice by circulating a handbill:
The undersigned again deems it his duty to appear before you in a circular. It may not be known to all of you, that the day after my detachment was disbanded at Carthage, I received orders from the executive to muster them into service again, and remain in the county until further orders.
I have now been in Nauvoo with my detachment a week and can
say to you with perfect assurance that the demonstrations made by the Mormon population , are unequivocal. They are leaving the State, and preparing to leave, with every means that God and nature has placed in their hands. … The anti-Mormons desire the removal of the Mormons; this is being effected peaceably and with all possible dispatch. All aggressive movements, therefore, against them at this time, must be actuated by a wanton desire to shed blood, or to plunder. …
A man of near sixty years of age, living about seven miles from this place, was taken from his house a few nights since, stripped of his clothing, and his back cut to pieces with a whip, for no other reason than because he was a Mormon, and too old to make successful resistance. Conduct of this kind would disgrace a horde of savages. … To the Mormons I would say, go on with your preparations and leave as fast as you can. Leave the fighting to be done by my detachment. If we are overpowered, then recross the river, and defend yourselves and property.
The fighting in Nauvoo progressed rapidly to full-scale warfare with canon and ball on both sides. The State Militia split and fought itself, one faction with the Christian-sponsored mobs, one faction defending the Mormons.
The Ba
ttle of Nauvoo was the final chapter in the forceful expulsion of the Mormons from Nauvoo. The so-called Anti-Mormon Party, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the "Regulators," were bent on driving the remaining citizens out by force despite the well-known fact that most had gone and the rest were making plans to do so.
Some 600 to 1,000 strong, the Regulators were led first by Col. John Singleton and later by John Carlin of Carthage. The core of this unlawful mob was none other than the notorious Carthage Greys, who had played such a prominent role in the murders of Joseph and Hyrum two years before.
On the other side, two groups defended the city: the "Spartan Band" of heavily armed Latter-day Saints, and the "Kill Devils" made up of several of the so-called "new citizens," that is recent non-Mormon move-ins who had a vested interest in preserving property values.
Gov. Thomas Ford, sensing imminent conflict, commissioned Major James R. Parker of the 32nd Regiment of the Illinois State Militia to order all the would-be combatants to return to their homes and "preserve the peace." Parker, seeing the determination of Carlin’s force to wreak havoc on the city regardless of executive order, and sensing Ford’s reluctance to dispatch a large regiment of neutral militiamen, followed the course of political expediency by signing a treaty with Singleton which called for peace and disarmament. Singleton and Parker then quit the field and the Regulators chose Col. Thomas Brockman ("Old Tom") to finish what Singleton had refused to do.
On Sept. 10, 1846, Brockman ordered the first assault on the city comp
lete with cannon fire, driving families out of their homes and down toward the river. The first real exchange of volleys came two days later, on Sept. 12, and for the next four days the bell tower porch of the Nauvoo Temple served as an ideal perch from which to view the several forays and skirmishes across roadways, backyards and cornfields. Nauvoo’s defenders responded with cannon fire of their own. Despite a valiant resistance in which few men were killed on either side, by Sept. 16 the Nauvoo defenders had agreed to surrender the city.
The "Articles of Accommodation, Treaty and Agreement" – drawn up between the Nauvoo Trustees (John S. Fullmer, Almon W. Babbitt and Joseph L. Heywood) on the one side and Brockman and Carlin on the other and chaired by Andrew Johnson of the Quincy Committee) – stipulated the immediate surrender of the city and of all arms in return for a pledge of safety and protection for people and property. The defenders soon disbanded and about 3 p.m. on Sept. 17 the mob, numbering more than 1,500, marched into the city, down Mulholland Street to the temple, then to Main Street and down to Parley Street where Henry I. Young gave up the temple keys to Johnson.
The invaders, however, showed little respect for temple or treaty. Parties of armed men ransacked and desecrated the temple while others roamed around the city ordering families to leave within two hours or other short notice. Many of the sick were treated with cruelty and families were molested while burying their dead. Others went from house to house plundering cow yards, pigpens, hen roosts, and bee stands, tearing up floors and otherwise destroying property with impunity.
Meanwhile an unidentified preacher ascended the temple tower and proclaimed with a loud voice, "Peace, Peace, Peace to the inhabitants of the Earth, now the Mormons are driven."5
The Mormons never really had a prayer making friends anywhere in the Midwestern region. In the end, it was inevitable by sheer force of numbers, that the frontier politicians, Christian preachers, Godless capitalists out to make a buck, and their attendant, Scots-Irish, Tennessee enforcement mob would win. The entire area was ruled by hick mobs for generations afterward.
As Governor Thomas Ford, the man Mormons still claim set up their first prophet for mob execution summed it up:
I had a good opportunity to know the early settlers of Hancock county. I had attended the circuit courts there as States-attorney, form 1830, when the county was first organized, up to the year 1834; and to my certain knowledge the early settlers, with some honorable exceptions, were, in popular language, hard cases.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wZcontent/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
I won’t reiterate the whole history of Christian persecution of non-Christians. I won’t rehash the Christian persecution and common extermination of its own body–those deemed by the ruling Christian faction of the day to be heretical. That history speaks for itself and is certainly exposed adequately throughout my twenty-five previous essays in this seri
es. Mormons are not only outside any historical view of Christian orthodoxy but Joseph Smith personally insulted the entire world Christian community by telling them they had lost the plot. So all of organized religion, all of American Christianity, openly sanctioned the genocide of the “Mormon Race,” as it was often called. American Christianity’s jihad against Mormonism was an openly published mission, so well documented that any Christian attempting to dispute it makes a total ass out of himself without any help from me. (But I do what I can to help them out.)
Again, it’s not as if Mormons were the first victims of Christian vigilante justice in Illinois:
…As late as 1831 a gang almost controlled Pope and Massac counties, and even built a fort which had to be taken by storm by a small army of regulators. In 1837 occurred the better-known riots at Alton. A mob threw into the river the press of the Alton Observer, an Abolition newspaper published by Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy and a member of the mob were killed in a subsequent clash, and a second press destroyed. At about the same time Ogle, Winnebago, Lee and De Kalb counties all suffered from “organized bands of rogues, engaged in murders, robberies, horse-stealing, and in making and passing counterfeit money.
In 1841 in Ogle County a family of criminals named Driscoll shot down a Captain Campbell, of the respectables of the county, before the eyes of his family. Driscoll and one of his sons were convicted of the murder by a kangaroo court. “They were placed in a kneeling position, with bandages over their eye
s, and were fired upon by the whole company present, that there might be none who could be legal witnesses of the bloody deed. About one hundred of these men were afterwards tried for the murder and acquitted.
One would think that the violence at Carthage Jail in 1844 would have sickened the people of the state, but the conflicts that followed in Hancock county were by no means the only disturbances to trouble Governor ford. Another small civil war took place in Pope and Masaac counties in 1846. The militia of Union County, called in to keep the peace, refused to protect the suspected bandits and left the counties to the government of regulators, who, as always, began by terrorizing known criminals, moved to threatening the suspected, and ended hated and feared by honest and peaceful men.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Governor Ford again gives us an example of his “hard cases”:
A party of about twenty regulators went to the house of an old man named Mathis…. He and his wife resisted the arrest. The old woman being unusually strong and active, knocked down the one or two of the party with her fists. A gun was then presented to her breast accompanied by a threat of blowing her heart out if she continued her resistance. She caught the gun and shoved it downwards, when it went off and shot her through the thigh…. The party captured old man Mathis, and carried him away with them, since which time he has not been heard of, but is supposed to have been murdered.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Who were these “regulators?” Well, it was a generation or two before the flour bags with holes cut into them, and perhaps three generations before the pointy hats and flaming crosses, but one could think of them as precursors to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—a little neo-regulator outfit that later on likewise bedeviled the LDS Church. And of course, niggers, Kikes, Papist bastards, thieving redskins, Freemasons, foreigners of all stripes, Abolitionists, and so forth. (In their own unvarnished words.)
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a terrorist organization[11] by veterans of the Confederate Army.[16] They named it after the Greek word kuklos, which means circle. The name means "Circle of Brothers."[17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1381.html
http://www.conspirazzi.com/?p=657
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.sjsapush.com/ch4.php
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2009_summer_fall/regulators-movement-2.html
The KKK and these later frontier regulators are not to be confused with the original Regulator Movement, which actually began in 1760-1771, just before the American Revolution, as an uprising in North Carolina against corrupt colony officials. In South Carolina, around 1767, a group of farmers likewise organized an enforcement body to “regulate” back country affairs, which in their locale meant primarily ferreting out ruffians, highwaymen, thieves, and scoundrels of all sorts. Perhaps taking up the idea from North Carolinians, Yankee “regulators” essentially pulled off the Boston Tea Party. One of their chief features at the time was disguising themselves as Indians in the course of their dastardly deeds. One very famous “regulator” outfit was known as the “Sons of Liberty.”
Following the Regulator Movement in North Carolina (1766-1771), Sandy Creek Baptists played a key role in the tremendous growth of the Baptist denomination in the South, and their political beliefs influenced the changing views regarding the common man in America throughout the late eighteenth century.
While a noble effort on many levels, it was during this original regulator era that southern rednecks, Scots-Irish, mostly poor or working-class citizens, seemed to connect with a Calvinized Southern Baptist, Fundamentalist religious orientation, which in turn combined with a political belief that America was holy land set aside by God in which to build the ultimate, pure, Christian Nation. (An exclusively white, rednecked, Fundamentalist, slave-holding, Protestant Christian Nation that is.) Baptists had been persecuted from the Old 
World through the New England Colonial era, but in the American South, variants of this sect finally found a power-base amongst an ambitiously predatory class of generally disrespected “Ulster Scots,” or Protestant Irish, who had largely emigrated from Scotland to Ireland, and then on to the American colonies. Many of these immigrants left their homeland under dubious circumstances, and in general either never amounted to much in their homeland, were fleeing or being "transported" for criminal charges, or just desperate to escape hunger and poverty. They were keen converts to a message of the "American Dream," and a promised "Manifest Destiny."
By 1771 however, both the North and South Carolinian Regulators had been forcibly disbanded, more or less in deference to the greater power of the Crown and Tidewater Aristocracy. And here we have the Appalachian, East Tennessee, Born-Again connection to Mormon persecution appearing at its root: One of these groups of Regulators fled to what is now Tennessee, and there formed the Wautaga association from land leased from the Cherokee. They brought with them their own culture and tribal, shadow government. Their religious and civic orientation centered around a Christian Vigilante motif. To be expected, they soon stole all the rest of the Cherokee land in the region, with the help of fellow Scots-Irish, Calvinist rednecks like president Andrew Jackson. Then they stole all the land from all the Indians. Then they kicked out the Indians entirely–even the "civilized" and "Christianized" ones. It’s a pattern of behavior that is unmistakable in the Christian Nation, “Manifest Destiny” community. And when they’d filled Appalachia to brimming with themselves and their friends, they began to spread their self-“regulating” culture west to Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and everywhere ol’ "Hickory"Andrew Jackson’s favorite Scots-Irish rednecks eventually migrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/sons.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0851561.html
By the first few decades of the 1800’s, in the wild west of Missouri and southern Illinois, any altruistic,
patriotic notion of a “regulator” had entirely degenerated from its original ethical mission. The title had been appropriated by half-assed mobs, loosely directed by ad-hoc vigilance committees. Most of these were hangers-on to Christian Fundamentalist, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant-supremist, sometimes nativist cabals, most of them connected to pro-slavery movements, particularly pro-slavery Christian churches, intent upon dominating local politics. Until the Baptists showed up, most of these churches were Southern Presbyterian offshoots, Episcopal or Methodist/Episcopal, dissenters originally split off of the Church of England over a disagreement with the English Crown’s claim as head of the Church. Yes, and give the Southern Baptist Convention it’s due: most of the pro-slave, Fundamentalist, Biblically-justified Christian Nation rationale came from the Americanized, Southern Baptist/Redneck Regulator ideologies. They were highly motivating notions that found a wide base of approval in the New Christian World. Indeed, the Knights of the Golden Circle, America’s first genuine, nation-wide, home-grown vigilante hate group, began to organize in 1846 while the Mormons of Illinois were still bugging out. These pro-slavery, redneck mobs, became highly organized, secretive, and succeeded in infiltrating political bodies, police forces, and militias. Their tactics were most effective, and it is this secret order which is credited with spawning numerous, famous outlaw gangs both before and after the Civil War, effecting the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and later evolving into the KKK, among other things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle
The Warsaw Regulators for example, were in the core of the mob that stormed Carthage Jail to kill Joseph Smith. They, like all the other “regulators,” of the era, began as vigilante squads of bored farmers, ex-militia and militia with nothing to do for excitement, backslidden rabble along for the ride, and clandestine thugs just out for a thrill. Who directed them? Originally, their often murky direction came directly from the intimations of the good townsfolk as instructed usually by their Christian ministers. What was their original purpose? To clean up the lawless and pacify the region. Initially, this gave their otherwise, miserable, mundane or pointless lives a higher sense of purpose. And what did they do when they cleaned up the lawless and pacified the region? Well, they either annoyed the locals who had created them with their new-found skills of violence, terror and intimidation, which had to be kept honed, or the locals had to point them at some other form of “lawlessness” they could be assigned to clean up.
Enter the Mormons. If the local ministers all said Mormons were villains, confidence men, murderers and thieves, well, Mormons were fair targets. Indeed, Mormons were not only fair game according to period Christian authorities, they were mandated by God for extinction. The “regulators,” Al Qaeda of the era, didn’t need any more direction than that.
Of course, when they ran out of Mormons, the “regulators” had to find somebody else to harass. And they did. IE: Bleeding Kansas. And don’t let me give you the impression that the whole “regulator” concept and its attendant brutality was the exclusive patent of Southern, slave-holding rednecks, hicks, and hillbillies. John Brown is the most heroic, admired, Yankee Abolitionist figure in American history for instance:
"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done."
–John Brown, statement at his sentencing on Nov. 2, 1859"[John Brown is] that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,–the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross."
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his lecture "Courage," delivered in Boston on Nov. 8, 1859http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/johnbrown/brownhome.html
The same sort of pronouncements could have been, and indeed have been, made by Joseph Smith and other great Americans concerning Smith’s own struggles against redneck pro-slave Christianity. The difference between the heroic Abolitionist John Brown and Joseph Smith the Abolitionist Mormon heretic, is Smith was fighting both the Southern Born-Again mobs, while he was also being condemned for religious conflicts set up two generations earlier by the pious Northern Abolitionist Christians as well. The latter won the war with both of the former, and thus, Mormons and Johnny Rebs have been weighed as equal villains, equal traitors to the American cause in all official histories. But just how clean were the hands of Saint John Brown the Yankee Liberator, and his heroic, patriotic Christian crusade against slavery?
Brown and the free settlers were optimistic that they could bring Kansas into the union as a slavery-free state. But in late 1855 and early 1856 it was increasingly clear to Brown that pro-slavery forces were willing to violate the rule of law in order to force Kansas to become a slave state. Brown believed that terrorism, fraud, and eventually deadly attacks became the obvious agenda of the pro-slavery supporters, then known as "Border Ruffians." After the winter snows thawed in 1856, the pro-slavery activists began a campaign to seize Kansas on their own terms. Brown was particularly affected by the Sacking of Lawrence in May 1856, in which a sheriff-led posse destroyed newspaper offices and a hotel. Only one man, a Border Ruffian, was killed. Preston Brooks‘s caning of anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner also fueled Brown’s anger. These violent acts were accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion, and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims, and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose" (quoted in Reynolds, p. 162). Brown was outraged by both the violence of the pro-slavery forces, and also by what he saw as a weak and cowardly response by the antislavery partisans and the Free State settlers, who he described as "cowards, or worse" (Reynolds pp. 163–164).
Well, so far, John Brown hasn’t discovered anything the Mormons hadn’t long ago experienced first-hand from first, his old Puritan Pals back in New England, and later from the “Border Ruffians,” who later plagued Brown. These "ruffians" of course, were the selfsame hick, pro-slave, hillbilly rednecks from Missouri, who again, for the most part, emigrated originally from the Scots-Irish Tennessee “regulator” breeding stock. And how does the sainted Mr. Protestant Martyr Brown respond to this persecution?
Sometime after 10:00 pm May 24, 1856, it is suspected they [Brown and company] took five pro-slavery settlers – James Doyle, William Doyle, Drury Doyle, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman – from their cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords. Brown later claimed he did not participate in the killings, however he did say he approved of them.
[edit]Account of the Pottawatomie Massacre by John Doyle, Son of James P. Doyle
"I, John C. Doyle, was born in Knox County, Tennessee December 19, 1838. My father, Pleasant Doyle, moved to Walker County, Ga., in 1845, moved to Chattanooga in 1848, and lived in and around Chattanooga until October 11, 1855, at which time we moved to Kansas; traveled through the country in wagons, via Nashville, Hopkinsville, Ky., St. Louis, Mo., Kansas City, Mo., then fifty miles southwest to Franklin County, Kansas, arriving there November 18, 1856. We settled on a claim of one hundred and sixty acres, built a house, and spent the winter there. In the spring of 1856 we planted a crop. Everything was quiet and peaceful until the night of May 24, when John Brown, with about twenty-five men, came to the house and demanded admittance. When refused admittance, they set fire to the house with torches made of prairie hay. To keep up all from being burned to death my father opened the door. They came in the house and handcuffed my father and my two older brothers and started to take me but my mother begged them to leave me, as I would be all the protection she would have. Brown told mother they were going to take father and the boys to the army, and left the house with them. They took them about three hundred yards from the house and murdered them. My father was shot in the head, my brothers cut to pieces. They left them all dead in a heap. They then went over two miles further to Potawatma River and killed two more men by the names of Wilkerson and Sherman. After they had killed my father and brothers, some of Brown’s men came back to our house to get our horses, but failed to find them, as we had them staked out on the prairie to graze, as that was the way we had to feed them.
In John Brown’s defense, murdering, terrorist that he is, the men he and his thugs dragged out of their homes
and chopped up at Pottowottomie, apart from their homespun agricultural activities, were also probably in the habit of riding around the countryside all night with a pack of their friends, and similarly brutalizing Abolitionists–when they weren’t lynching or horsewhipping niggers to keep them in their place. Like the Fancher Party of Mountain Meadows fame, the conception of these victims of Brown’s violence as simple, honest farmers is highly subjective. Even my characterization of them as hillbilly, rednecked hicks is something of an anachronism. In the day, mobbing Indians, perverts, and Mormons, lynching niggers, burning presses and killing Abolitionists, was a mainstream, patriotic, Christian activity. It wasn’t society’s imbeciles, the inherently violent or the idiot-cousins in the culture that were instigators of this behavior. It was rather, the very God-fearing, simple country farmers with wives and families and dreams of success in America, we keep hearing about from their defenders. That’s who the "Regulators" were at the core of it all.
Most of the politics the Mormons found themselves embroiled in during their attempted settlement of what is now the American Midwest, had less to do with Mormonism per-se, and more to do with getting them out of the way so Christianity could fight with itself. I know I’ve titled my ramblings “Religion for Mormons and other Idiots,” but even an idiot should be able to see a number of consistent themes in the way Christians abuse one-another. For all the anti-Mormon "outrages" alluded-to by the rednecked mobs, their authorizing ministers, civil officials and their lackey press, for all their bemoaning of the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, and despite
their claims of treason and rebellion, in reality, in this era, destroying presses you disagreed with politically or religiously was a common American Christian practice. And when Christians wrecked a press historically, they nearly always killed the proprietors and authors of the writings they wanted suppressed. Just like the Inquisition did. Just like Calvin did. Just like the Church of England and nearly every other State-Church did.
Christian mob-militias didn’t just innovatively start to hack up and blow the heads off men and boys, or rape and pillage Mormon settlements like Haun’s Mill, Far West, or Nauvoo because they feared a hideous Mormon threat. This wasn’t a unique, reactive modality spawned out of some extraordinarily frightening sense of Mormon imposition upon American Christian sensibilities. Christianity has been hacking and raping and torturing and slaughtering itself up for centuries, millennia. The Quincy Committee, the Nauvoo Committee, the Mob Manifesto authors, these Christian “patriots” didn’t just put together their own “Secret Constitutions,” out of a singlular desperation to justify ignoring the law, reason, and common sense to achieve their political and social dominance. There is nothing unique at all in this pattern of Christian oppression, in the New World or the Old, in Roman Catholic circles or Protestant. Even John Brown, the "enlightened" Abolitionist, Yankee “good guy” drafted up a “Provisional Constitution” to ennoble his rebellion and butchery. That’s what Christians do. That’s a system of belief exposing its true nature for two-thousand years now.
But what do Mormons believe in this regard you may ask? And well you may. It’s almost as if I was leading you up to this:
…But if any man is authorized to take away my life because he says I am a false teacher, then upon the same principle I am authorized to take away the life of every false teacher, and where would be the end of blood? And who would not be the sufferer? But no man is authorized to take away life because of a difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate, right or wrong….
Do not insult your own intelligence as well as mine by refusing to admit by now that apart from the claim of heresy, the whole Mormon
era from Missouri to the Civil War, was politically dominated by a rather different religious question. One faction of Christianity believed the Bible had cursed the negro to an eternity of slavery, and another faction of Christianity determined that the Bible decreed slavery to be a primitive and barbaric practice. This was not in essence a political argument, except insofar as both Christian factions declared themselves to be the exclusive interpreters of both Biblical and Constitutional dogma, and that all other religious or political views were therefore detrimental to a pure Christian State in America. This is no more or less than warring Christian factions have always done. In this argument, while Joseph Smith was clearly an Abolitionist, by also claiming to be a prophet, his social and political righteousness earned the Latter-day Saints no friends on either side of this pressing American question. Mormonism was simply in the road, the common enemy of all, so and thus both the regressive, ignorant, Bible-thumping, slave-whipping rednecks, and the pious, "enlightened" educated, Beattitudinal Yankees hit Mormonism with everything they had. The Mormon wars were essentially but a practice run for a bigger and better war these American Christian factions already had festering between themselves, already impatiently pencilled in at the back of their Manifest Destiny planning schedule.
One cannot concede that Abolitionist, Northern, American Christianity–led first by the Whigs and then the new Republican Party, was any kinder to Mormonism than Southern, pro-slavery Christianity–led by the Democrat Party. It was however, the extreme, daily, misfortune of the Latter-day Saints to find that it was the latter, coarser, less-sophisticated branch of their Christian persecutors that they constantly found themselves rubbing community elbows with. And even after finding something of a haven for themselves in Utah, eventually the worst of the Appalachian rednecks, first in the form of Baptist and Methodist reformers who followed the US invasion forces into the Territory, and then in the form of three generational incarnations of the KKK, all spun from East Tennessee’s “regulator” heritage, who likewise migrated themselves and their ideologies all the way to Utah, and again listed Mormonism as their worst enemy, and again did their best to incriminate, irritate, and hopefully eradicate Mormonism.
As a persecuted minority, it’s today far easier for Mormonism to institutionally euphemize its persecutors into
some nameless, generically evil, faceless mob. The devil made them do it. Satan hardened their hearts. That way Mormons can still pretend they’re all brothers and sisters in Christ with their contemporary “Christian” neighbors. For their part however, their Christian neighbors will only believe this if for some fluke reason they posses a shred of inherent inspiration and enlightenment from Christ Himself. Any good will and brotherhood from that source however, will vanish in a puff of dogma the second they are corrected by their “orthodox” Christian clergies. None of the essential Christian sects and doctrines have so centrally changed their core beliefs since their days of indiscriminately killing off opponents, that they don’t still count Mormons as Godless heretics and Satanic pawns—and this at a minimum. That rhetoric may be embarrassing to mainstream Christians today, but it remains essential Christian orthodoxy. In 1844 it was the common language of the pulpit and press. The day after the Expositor was destroyed by Nauvoo’s city council, this is the Christian response, drafted at the very first preliminary meeting of Christian civic leadership on the news, before any clear facts had been established:
Resolved…that we hold ourselves at all times in readiness to cooperate with our fellow citizens in this state, Missouri, and Iowa, to exterminate – UTTERLY EXTERMINATE, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles.
Resolved…that the time, in our opinion, has arrived when the adherents of Smith as a body, shall be driven from the surrounding settlements into Nauvoo; that the Prophet and his miscreant adherents should be demanded at their hands, and if not surrendered, A WAR OF EXTERMINATION SHOULD BE WAGED, To the entire destruction if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
This is an honest, heartfelt, unapologetic, naked and untempered Christian demand for immediate, heretical Mormon blood–through any means and at any cost to law and society. This is the Christian mission statement that anti-Mormonists will never show you. This is the Christian charter that killed Joseph Smith. And for what? Was it prompted by some overt, impending, even if reciprocal Mormon threat? Was it because Joseph Smith, like the heroic, famed crusader for human liberty, the Christian Yankee Abolitionist John Brown, 
took a few "regulators" to the homes of his nearest political antagonists, dragged them off, shot them in the head, hacked them to pieces, and then left the bodies piled in a heap at the end of the driveway for their victims’ surviving wives and children to deal with? Or, if Christianity now declares Joseph Smith devilish and evil for discretely taking more than one woman to bed–as if this was ever anyone’s business but his own and that of the women who willingly shared his nocturnal companionship–was even this the excuse raised for his assassination? No, by their own admission, the Christian lynch mob that killed Joseph Smith did so as a reply to a disputed Nauvoo City Council decision concerning the operation of a printing press.
Those with any insight at all will immediately recognize in anti-Mormonism, all the key historically Christian rhetoric and stereotypical charges hurled against the Jews throughout their history of persecution: wicked, bloodthirsty, monopolizing all the goodies, keep to themselves, cheat the Gentiles, out to kill Christians and take their stuff, out to steal women, drink the blood of infants and virgins in Satanic secret rituals, bla bla bla…
The “orthodox” or “Historical” Christian political agenda screams from the media still today, even if largely muzzled and tamed out of necessity in "mainstream" congregations by a higher level of public enlightenment than in Joseph Smith’s day. But at the end of the day, it was the victorious, Yankee Calvinists who won their last bloody laugh, first at the Southern redneck slave-holders, and when those Godless Rebel bastards had been put in their place, they turned finally back to the Mormons they rediscovered hiding from their pious wrath out in Utah. The Rebel hillbillies we all know, got their comeuppance at the end of a massive national military battle the Yankee victors now call the "Civil War." The Mormons, well, the forces of "enlightened" Christianity finally found a way to beat them into humility as well. It took patience and finesse, but eventually they did with the stroke of a pen what they had failed to do from Palmyra to Salt Lake City by fire and sword.
And now the game is well afoot. On to Utah. in the words of the late-great Irish Republican Army: Do and say nothing ‘till you hear more.
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 Jeffersonhttp://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.
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.
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
I
n 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 we![Slavery20handbill20offering20cash20f[2]](http://lrwhitney.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/slavery20handbill20offering20cash20f2.jpg "Slavery20handbill20offering20cash20f[2]")
re 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.
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
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
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/
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.
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
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
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’ firs
t 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://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. ![225px-Oliver_Cromwell_by_Samuel_Coop[2]](http://lrwhitney.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/225px-oliver_cromwell_by_samuel_coop2.jpg "225px-Oliver_Cromwell_by_Samuel_Coop[2]")
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 Cathol
ics 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
All Hail the Protestants Part 4: That Old Time Religion
America’s Christian propagandists tell their children the story of Pilgrim Fathers who fled persecution in England for religious freedom in the New World. (And yes, it is propaganda, look the word up). And no, I’m not slapping down the Christians and taking the Mormon side of this argument. Mormons are big advocates of this happy American Pilgrim fable.
The proposition that there could be anything inherently wrong with the Pilgrims is going to be infuriatingly offensive to Christians of any stripe in America. And remember, again, in their mind, this includes Mormons, because they think they’re Christians like anyone else. Like every other American Christian, Mormons believe they are the end product of thousands of years of Godly guidance and constant refinement.
The American need to romanticize the Pilgrims stems from telling yourself for generations just how specially blessed by God you are for simply being an American citizen if for no other positive attributes. Of course you need proof of this every day just to stem off the creeping disbelief caused by looking at yourself in the mirror every morning and knowing how messed up you really are. So American children are raised on this wonderful little fairy tale about the quaint boys and girls of Plymouth Rock and how they helped mommy Pilgrim and daddy Pilgrim bring Jesus to the red American savages and preserve “True Religion” in the free country the founded. Naturally, it makes you, as a young Christian, and patriotic child of America, feel all warm and fuzzy, and your eyes get all rosy red and weepy when you are reassured like this, from sea to shining sea, every year in a national holiday, that you are absolutely wonderful and chosen by God.
The truth is, the Pilgrims were Puritan fascists who were only looking for their own religious freedom. They
were too damned pious, independent and fanatical even for the more mainstream zealots of English and European Reformations. They called themselves “Puritans” because they were dedicated to purifying the Church of England of Roman influences. They hated Rome and they hated heretics, and they hated sinners and they really hated witches. Their reigning English King, James I was also a foaming Protestant Scottish witch hunter, and was every bit as fanatical as the Pilgrims were, since they were all theological soul mates. But James I actually had to sophisticate himself a bit, particularly stifling his witch-hating fanaticism when he took power in England. He had to accommodate the more moderate and educated Protestantism that then still held great sway in his English Court and Parliament. This social moderation at home however, didn’t slow him from encouraging the exportation of sharp, Puritan zeal to his growing colonies in the New World though, where raw Puritanism would be free to dominate the new society he intended to found there.
http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/mayflower/mayflower_compact.htm
I say with very little exaggeration, that living under Puritan rule in the New England American Colonies would be nearly as religiously oppressive as living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Wahhabi ruled Saudi Arabia. The principle difference between Sharia Law and Pilgrim Law would be that the Pilgrims let women show their whole faces in public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia
http://www.iran-bulletin.org/political_islam/punishmnt.html
When American Protestants in particular talk about “Puritanism,” they allude to what they term a Protestant reaction to a Roman Church who’s clergy had become entirely corrupt. The Roman Church sold forgiveness to those who could afford it. The Roman Church was liberal and debauched within its hierarchy, but punishingly strict to the common folk. The Roman Church picked who would and who would not be saved based upon social and political intrigue and if it were at all possible to extract from the sinner, the Roman Church would invariably negotiate a generous contribution to the Church which could fix nearly any sin. We are also told by modern Protestants, when they praise their “Reforming” of this corrupted Roman Church, that it was also the goal of the Reformation to correct the excesses of the Inquisition, to liberate mankind to think and speak freely in Church or public venues. Modern Protestants contend that it was the torture and torment and brutal repression of art and science and music and free will that the Puritans wanted to purify out of the Roman Church. It was the selling of indulgences and political meddling that the Reformers wanted to reform out of the Church.
While it was true that the Reformation wanted to correct the corrupt doctrinal cottage industry the Roman Church had set up to support its clergy, the Puritans in particular on the other hand, weren’t all that put off by
the Inquisition’s tactics or even goals in and of themselves. The Puritans and many other Reformers in truth just wanted the Inquisitional zeal applied unilaterally up and down the Church ranks from clergy to commoner. They just didn’t think you should be able to buy or politic your way out of being tortured into a confession of heresy. They figured that kings, Popes and bishops and priests were just as good candidates for heresy as anyone else—the more the merrier. Puritans in short, actually wanted more repression and more micromanaging of the Body of Christ. They wanted the power to institute the same sort of fanatical purification of Christendom that the Inquisition only pretended to enforce, and then only selectively, often for personal, social, or political reasons. The Puritans wanted their newly cleansed Protestant Inquistition to be universally applied to all Christians of whatever rank. The Puritans wanted everyone to be beaten into piety whatever his station in the Church or society– they just wanted to insure it was being done fairly and correctly by a dictatorial theocracy of their own design.
We read about the Salem Witch trials, some decades after the Pilgrims landed, and think that hanging nineteen men and women as witches on the say-so of a couple of snotty little girls looking for attention was a fluke carried out by an isolated, small group of inbred fanatics. We think the old man they crushed under stones for refusing to submit to their trials was the result of some abnormal paranoia due to the bunker mentality of a pioneer colony in a harsh new land. When we read about the dozens of fellow colonists they just let rot in jail for months as they queued them up for their American Inquisition, we assume that this sort of fiendish treatment had to be the product of some sort of atypical mass mental illness brought about through a bad diet and not enough sunlight. But no, that’s what Puritans did. That’s what Protestants did. That’s what the Roman Church did before them. That’s what Christians have always done.
The Reformation just made torture and inquisition a sport anyone could dabble in by voting themselves into power, rather than restricting the game to a permanent class of elite clergy and the high-born. The Pilgrims merely wanted to democratize religious persecution so the common man–and men only mind you–could get a piece of the action.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_ACCT.HTM
http://www.libraryontheweb.org/student_pages/witch_trials/trials.html
The Pilgrims didn’t intend to found a nation based upon the freedom of religion at all. They hadn’t the slightest conception of a pluralistic society that could tolerate letting everyone worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience and understanding. Their America was founded as the Puritan’s chance at the unfettered purification of human society as they defined purity, through whatever means necessary, with nobody looking over their shoulder to moderate their efforts. The Pilgrims intended to establish a Bible Commonwealth. Citizenship, or “Freemanship” as they called it, was restricted to church members. Religious dissenters were banished. Originally even freemen didn’t even have the right to elect the colony’s officers. These were appointed by the clergy councils.
http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/colonial_life/pilgrims.htm
The allegedly God-fearing, venerated, funny-hat-and buckle-wearing Pilgrims we celebrate at Thanksgiving
every year by eating pumpkin pie and turkey till we can’t walk straight, brought with them a culture of religious bigotry. They whipped, imprisoned, hung, and publicly humiliated even their minor religious offenders in stocks, dungeons, gallows and on whipping posts usually in the town square or other places of public access where their fellow colonists could pass by and mock or taunt them. When we see these quaint depictions of Puritan discipline in woodcuts or read about them in history books, we are usually told or allowed to assume these punishments had something to do with civil misdemeanors or criminal activities. To the contrary, most of these routine sentences to ritual public humiliation were related to not living up to their legally mandated “Christian” obligations. Or rather, poor Christian observance was criminal activity to them.
The Pilgrims didn’t really put a big red letter “A” on your breast to shame you as an adulterer, or suspected adulterer–since the accusation alone was usually enough to destroy you. The Pilgrims by law could kill you for adultery, though in practice this never happened. And it was the letters “AD” with which you would be marked, and if found without this mark you would be branded on the forehead. This was later liberalized to merely whipping adulterers severely twice, giving recovery time between whippings, and marking them with “AD” letters–then if caught without this marking, rather than branding them, the sentence was moderated to severely whipping them again and again, every time they were found improperly labeled.
Fornicators who refused to get married were severely whipped, fined, and imprisoned. Getting married would let you off with only a fine, but the fine was far greater if you were already engaged, because you had already gotten the ultimate sex problem solved and you just didn’t have the piety to patiently wait for the ceremony. You would get three hours in the public stocks for cursing God or lying in public. If you denied the Holy Scriptures, a magistrate could sentence you to as severe a whipping as he felt appropriate to humble you, short of endangering life or limb.
In one rare Plymouth Colony case, bestiality got one confused farm boy hung, and the interesting thing there is that they also executed the sinful animals. I presume this was so these corrupted livestock would not go about the colony enticing other colonists into the same sin with their sexy barnyard ways.
Two gay Pilgrims in Plymouth got both whipped to shards, one of which was banished into the wilderness to die, and the more repentant one, the one apparently not deemed the instigator, was branded on the shoulder with a hot iron and banned from ever owning property in the colony, but allowed to remain.
There were two witchcraft trials in Plymouth colony, decades before the more famous Salem trials, though in Plymouth “not-guilty” verdicts were issued and the complainants were fined for bringing false charges.
The Pilgrims lived in a patriarchal theocracy and its patriarchs were misogynists bastards in general. For example, in 1662 Thomas Bird was sentenced to a double whipping for adultery with the unfortunately named Hannah Bumpass. Bumpass was essentially seduced or coerced by Bird, but she was given a stout single whipping anyway for quote: “…yielding to him, and not making such resistance against him as she ought.”
If the Pilgrims really didn’t like you over some generalized heretical activity they couldn’t pin down with a specific charge, or if they just didn’t like your attitude, or you were missing too many sermons on Sunday without a good excuse like being trapped in a well or withering away on your sickbed, they would just banish you to die alone out in the wilderness by “shunning” you.
The Pilgrims would fine you for harboring a Quaker. (The Quaker they would drive out to die in the wilderness.)
The Pilgrims would even punish you for celebrating Christmas or Easter because they weren’t in the Bible. They probably would not approve of the nation of their legacy inventing yet another un-Biblical holiday in their honor and calling it “Thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving is not in the Bible and therefore is not holy. Celebrating it would be unholy. Unholiness is punished.
http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/History/CrimeAndPunishment.php
http://www.newnorth.net/~johhnson/geneology/beliefs.html
http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/colonial_life/pilgrims.htm
http://almy.us/news/newsletters/website/art0402.htm
The architect of the American Theocratic Paradise the Puritan Pilgrims had come to create, was called by the English, John Calvin. His allegedly brilliant religious mind fired up Reformationists all over the European religious theatre into ecstatic heights of raving piety. If you believe his modern Christian fans, Calvin was a modest and quiet man who restored pure, Biblical Truth to all mankind. To other Christians, he’s a despotic know-it-all and a sanctimonious, unqualified upstart. To quite a few Christians, and many more non-Christians, John Calvin is one of the most evil men in the history of the planet.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/calvin/
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/John_Calvin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
http://one-evil.org/people/people_16c_Calvin.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03195b.htm
Jean Cauvin was born in 1509 in Noyon, in the Picardy region of France, son of Gerard Cauvin, primary attorney for Charles de Hangest, bishop of Noyon, who among other things oversaw the prosecution of heretics and witches. The Church routinely tortured and murdered heretics of course, but in the wake of the Papal Bull of Pope Innocent VIII, (1482-1492) the publication of Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484, and the follow-up pamphlet Malleus Maleficarum in 1486 by Dominican monks Henrich Kramer and James Sprenger, the French Church became infected with the witch hunting hysteria that had already been sweeping across Europe.
http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
John Calvin retained a fervor for sniffing out and prosecuting witches throughout his life, which was about the only thing he and the Vatican ever agreed upon. In fact, he started out his education in Paris to study Latin, and prepare for the Roman priesthood. He was sent there by his father to build upon the Church and social base of power he had already laid the infrastructure for in Noyon.
A few years into it, Calvin’s father became involved in a Church-related financial debacle that inflated into a full-fledged scandal. Gerard was either guilty of a major screw-up or just got chosen by the Church to be the patsy and was excommunicated. His former boss added the trumped-up charge of heresy just to teach him a lesson.
Nicholas Cop, Rector of the University of Paris, a Protestant activist, had grown fond of young Calvin, and agreed to fund his education if he would change his studies to law since a career for him as a professional Roman Catholic was at that point pretty much out of the question. It was also a tribute to Calvin’s old man. John did change his study to Legal Humanism, but his father died some years later as the result of a long and dragging depression and physical illness. John’s mother had died earlier, and His father was denied burial on consecrated ground with her until John and his older brother were able to give security for the payment of their father’s debts and other obligations the Roman Church demanded.
Having lost all pride, family fortune and social position, John continued with his legal studies and attained a Doctorate in Law at Orleans in 1532. He returned to Paris rather cheesed off at the Catholic Church. He tied up with Nicholas Cop again and became an enthusiastic Protestant Reformer. That didn’t last long before the French Church chased them both out of town and Calvin settled in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked on and published his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion.
http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/books/institutes/
John rubbed elbows throughout his law studies with fellow Humanist lawyers who based their philosophies on the Classic Greek and Roman thinkers. He moved amongst Protestant Reformers of all stripes who moved in the same legal and philosophical circles. Calvin postulated a new sort of theocratic system based around a council of elders (“consistory” he called it) and envisioned openly that his hereditary heirs would carry this absolute rule into posterity. He wrote a catechism and confession of faith for this proposed social order. About the time he had worked his religious master plans out he had moved his quest for a job and a congregation into largely French-speaking Geneva Switzerland. There he had gained powerful supporters like the city Chancellor Ami Perrin and noted evangelist, pastor and Reformer, William Farel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ami_Perrin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Farel
After gaining an audience and some favor with the Geneva City Council through his highly placed friends, in January of 1538 , Calvin presented his plans for the systematic Reformation of a wild and wooly Geneva. The city council was hotly divided but ultimately rejected his proposals, particularly the earnestly drafted religious creed he wanted the entire city to swear to. The council also refused to grant Calvin and Farel the power to excommunicate, an authority they had demanded because it was critical to insure that their plans could be enforced. Calvin retaliated by denying the Lord’s Supper to all Genevans at the Easter services that soon followed, saying the entire city was too debased to be worthy of communion. The City Council kicked Calvin and Farel both out of Geneva literally on their arses, calling Calvin a would-be “Pope.”
Calvin hid out in Strasbourg Switzerland and found some financial support there. He engaged in a travelling lecture series. He secured a modest position as a pastor and began to build a reputation there as a speaker. Eventually in 1540 somebody still boostering him in Geneva remembered his polemic skills and invited him to author the city’s written response to a new Papal Bull demanding Geneva’s return to Vatican rule. Calvin wrote such a great refusal that he was invited back almost immediately to come help run the Reformation in Geneva, but Calvin didn’t trust Geneva’s government and Church councils enough to risk his life right away. There had been a genuine turnover in these social and political powers however, and Calvin’s supporters had indeed taken full charge of the city. After a year of negotiations that reassured him his authority would never again be questioned, Calvin returned triumphantly in 1541 to a huge banquet in his honor and piles of booty as a reward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/world/europe/05calvin.html
http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/14.html
Calvin had so re-arranged his new Geneva government that he had absolute power. He literally ran a theocracy. He controlled the police, the courts, the media, and every church in town. Those who cared to oppose or even debate him were swiftly dispatched one way or another, sometimes fatally, often brutally.
When he couldn’t find any conventional sinners to persecute, Calvin had an obsession with ferreting out
witches. Most of his victims in this sport were women who wouldn’t submit to his will or the will of their husbands. But again, that doesn’t make him unique in the Protestant world, Martin Luther was likewise an avid witch hater. Rating these two on the scale of social enlightenment, the best you can say about Calvin is that he was slightly less anti-Semitic than Luther was, and the best you can say about Luther is he was too busy demonizing Jews to have very much time actively persecuting any other demons in his pantheon of the Godless.
One of Calvin’s French fans from Geneva published Les Sorciers in 1564. This little tome, published in Geneva, proposed that witches were a major danger for humanity and had to be systematically exterminated.
http://www.visualstatistics.net/east-west/witch%20trials/witch%20trials.htm
In 1553 Calvin had a dispute with a Spanish physician through the mail. Servetus was one of the most brilliant
minds of the era and the first man to chart the human pulmonary system. Servetus opposed Trinitarianism and rejected infant baptism. Furthermore, Servetus had been mocking Calvin openly in various academic venues, calling him a despot and the “Pope of Geneva,” and bragging that he was coming to Geneva to argue the matter in person and hoped to join the honored ranks of those the great John Calvin had banished. Instead Calvin had him arrested, tried for heresy, and Calvin’s wholly-owned review panel obligingly condemned Servetus to be burned to death in a public square over a stack of his writings. The only objection Calvin raised was that he would have preferred to have beheaded Servetus rather than burn him.
Well, the whole truth is, Servetus wasn’t burned in a conventional sense at all. He was slowly roasted from a distance and scourged by showers of faggots, or hot coals over a period of at least five excruciating hours.
Calvin’s period and even modern supporters have actually defended Calvin’s actions by claiming–and I’m serious about this—that it’s fine that Servetus was executed for blasphemy and heresy, because he was indeed a blasphemous heretic. They sometimes claim that he should have known better than to come to Geneva and debate Calvin directly man-to-man, and that Calvin had warned him, and some even say that had Servetus been merely decapitated by sword as Calvin had preferred instead of being roasted alive with his books as the tinder, nobody would have been outraged and we wouldn’t still be remembering this one small blot on Calvin’s otherwise wonderful career. Some even say that Servetus repented to God as he slowly went up in greasy, fleshy smoke and begged Calvin to forgive him. This the Calvinists say, not only proves Calvin was right about his heresy, but demonstrates that Calvin actually did him a favor by lighting him up because he found Jesus in the end.
http://www.thestudiesinthescriptures.com/Pages/English/Eng%20PD/Eng%20PD%2080-89/EngPD%2085.htm
http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/michael-servetus/
http://www.calvin.edu/meeter/educational-resources/servetus-controversy.htm
http://thirdmill.org/newfiles/jac_arnold/CH.Arnold.RMT.8.html
http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/americas-debt-to-john-calvin
http://www.tnr.com/blog/damon-linker/calvin-and-american-exceptionalism
http://www.graceonlinelibrary.org/articles/full.asp?id=70%7C%7C868
Probably to avoid another unpopular and grisly public spectacle, what with all the screaming and the smell of burnt flesh permeating the town, In 1547 Calvin did actually specify the beheading of another congregant prone to debate, Jacques Gruet, for blasphemy. At some point Calvin got tired of his objections, so after breaking him down under torture, he got him to confess numerous sins, the biggest of which was taking credit for an anonymous note left on Calvin’s pulpit arguing against infant baptism. Jacques Gruet
In his reign over his City/State of Geneva, Calvin is known to have overseen the execution or torture of thousands of witches and religious non-conformists. Not even his supporters contest this fact. He tortured or killed adulterers and blasphemers, and even hung children from their armpits from gallows to signify that they deserved death, or just threatened them with death if they didn’t obey him. Calvin even executed one child for striking his parents.
http://baptist-potluck.blogspot.com/2009/06/this-is-calvin.html
To many, even those who helped John Calvin initially to power, like Ami Perrin, Calvin became a despot, a bully and hypocrite, the founder of a personality cult, not a Christian hero. In the end, Calvin imprisoned Perrin’s wife for the crime of dancing. His father-in-law was prosecuted in connection with his wife’s dancing for accusing Calvin of being the “Bishop of Geneva.” Perrin had originally hailed Calvin as a component of Guillaume Farel’s Reformation battle against Rome, but Farel soon came to be known as an appendage of Calvin’s Reformation Empire, and Perrin eventually lost all belief in Calvin’s mission in Geneva.
I understand that you are considering imprisoning my father-in-law and my wife. My said father-in-law is old, my wife is ill; by imprisoning them you will shorten their days, to my great regret, which I have not deserved, and which would be to give me poor recompense for the services I have done you. Therefore I beg you not to imprison them. If they have done wrong, I will bring them here to make such amends that you will have reason to be content. I pray you to grant me this, since if you put them in prison, God will aid me to avenge myself for it.
—Ami Perrin, quoted by François Bonivard[2]
I don’t know what made Perrin think this plea would have any effect on Calvin. In 1548, Calvin imprisoned his
own brother’s wife for suspected adultery but couldn’t prove the charge. Calvin dogged her down for nine years and in 1557 finally convicted her of adultery with one of his own servants. If Calvin’s own blood, family, and household wasn’t immune to his deadly piety, Perrin’s begging for mercy wasn’t going to have any influence at all on the “Pope of Geneva.” Not only was Perrin’s petition refused but Perrin was accused of treason.
http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/return-to-geneva-life-of-calvin-part-7
Perrin still maintained tremendous influence in Geneva however. There was a lengthy trial and acquittal, and Perrin began to openly move against his former comrade Calvin. Eventually Perrin led an attempted coup against Calvin’s government, based mainly on the promise to expel the hordes of French Protestant refugees like Calvin who were flocking to Geneva to escape the Inquisition or Roman Church in general. These “Huguenots” had all but taken over the Swiss city, and Perrin’s native Reformationists, who Calvin disparagingly and incorrectly called “Libertines,” could no longer stand the oppression of Calvin’s Calvinism. The Huguenots however, Calvin’s French friends, and many other refugee foreigners seemed to embrace Calvin’s pious, unilaterally oppressive and uniformly prosecuted religion. This has to be evaluated of course, in light of the alternative, which was for most going back to France or Spain or elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, and was being tortured and burned by the Inquisition.
Perrin’s rebellion failed and he was sentenced in absentia to have his right hand cut off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenot
http://www.ideofact.com/archives/000160.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/452566/Ami-Perrin
Perrin’s revolt was the last time anyone dared quibble with John Calvin about anything on any level on any subject in Geneva. Calvin dismissed Perrin’s defeat as God’s justice and described Perrin as “our comic Caesar.”
And yet, for all it’s blatantly despotic nature, today’s Calvinist apologists go so far as to claim Calvin’s Geneva is the pattern upon which the US Constitution was modeled.
http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=5153
http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-man-who-founded-america
-28077/
http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/issue06/calvin.htm
The truth is, even Calvin’s Bible said: By their fruits ye shall know them. The United States of America wasn’t the fruit of Calvin’s despotic theocracy. The United States of America was God’s attempt to clear His vineyard of Calvin’s religious weeds.
All Hail the Protestants Part 2: King Henry VIII
Henry Tudor VIII, King of England, Ireland, Pretender to the French throne, eventual King and uniter of England with Wales, Defender of the Faith, would-be Holy Roman Emperor, was born 28 June 1491. He took his father’s throne on 21 April, 1509, and died 28 January 1547, more-or-less peacefully, and still King of England. In his prime he was a handsome, fit, vigorous sporting man with a healthy wit. Contrary to popular opinion, he was not much of a rake or a lady’s man–unless they were fertile, not too ugly, skilled in childbirth and produced male offspring. The image we most conjure up of him is that of a deteriorated, disturbed, obese, probably syphilitic wreck obsessed almost entirely with providing his throne with a healthy and clear heir. In truth, Henry VIII was probably not syphilitic, and by most standards fairly chaste—with perhaps a couple of exceptions. He mostly had sex only with women he already had in the marriage queue with the intent of bearing him a son.
His plans for an heir were first thwarted in 1502, through his marriage to his older brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. You may coincidentally note that a few years earlier in 1492, when Henry was a year old , these two had sent one Christopher Columbus off to discover an island way the heck down off the Coast of South America. For this random landing, Columbus would get credit as the “discoverer” of “America” for the next five or six centuries. We know now of course, that the Norse, and probably Clan Gunn, Norse descendants from Scotland with some undisclosed Swedish shipmates, along possibly with St. Brendan of Ireland, had repeatedly “discovered” North America over a thousand years previously, and actually hung out at Plymouth Rock and other places where God would lead the “Pilgrims” and seekers of religious freedom at the actual start of “America” as we know it. This probably includes portaging up the St. Lawrence into Duluth and roaming down into the prairies of what is now Minnesota, where my own Lutheran ancestors would end up, also looking for religious and political freedom. I don’t know what that means, but when you start linking historical events together in the context of “God’s Divine Providence,” you can make anything fit into God’s master plan.
Henry became the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England, and his father, Henry VII, figured he needed to reaffirm that his Spanish alliance was cinched up in a tight bundle so he could poke away at France in case a chance to take that throne came up in the mix. Henry VII proposed that his new Heir, Henry VIII should step into the void and take young Catherine as his bride.
In the book of Leviticus, however, is the damning passage: “If a brother is to marry the wife of a brother they will remain childless.” This required a Papal dispensation to remove any doubt as to the validity of the union. To aid this scheme, Catherine claimed her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated–which is almost plausible since she was nearly a child and Arthur was in ill health and barely into puberty. (However, I know what I would have been doing at age 15 had I been given a “wife” and told to produce an heir…)
Catherine’s mother, Queen Isabella I, browbeat Pope Julius II into writing a Papal bull. A little more than a year after her husband’s death, Catherine was then betrothed to Henry VIII–who was just taking on secondary sexual characteristics and probably hadn’t had his voice change yet.
By 1505, Henry VII had gotten bored with the intrigues of a Spanish alliance, and Henry VIII had gotten bored with the notion of marrying Catherine for whatever reason. (Probably do to subsequent wistful options.) He claimed the union had been put together without his consent. Stalling and political maneuvering dragged on until his father died in 1509. One stumbling block to the wedding had to do with Henry VII being a frugal old coot, and he was holding back his huge portion of the wedding dowry. Isabella and company then held back on theirs.
On Henry VII’s death, Henry VIII took his old man’s money, his kingdom, took his Spanish dowry on top of it, and followed the political path of least resistance. He married his betrothed Catherine on 11 June, 1509, at the ripe old age of 17. They were crowned King and Queen of England at Westminster Abbey later that month in a huge, multi-national, fairy-tale wedding. This was the first of a lifetime of huge party blowouts Henry VIII was to throw to enhance his image at home and abroad.
Had this arrangement worked out for Henry VIII the English would have almost certainly remained Roman Catholic, and the Scots and Irish would have, for one, been so much the better for it. American history would have been entirely re-written and events in North America, notably the formation of the United States, would have probably gone in radically different directions.
Even without his evolving marriage issues, there were a great number of political and ostensibly religious arguments Henry VIII had with the Roman Pope at the time. He did however go through three Popes on friendly terms before Henry’s fixation on trying to fix his marital problems bottomed out into his eventual heresy and revolution. For one thing, England only got one Cardinal out of 50 to represent itself in Rome. Far lesser countries, Italy, France, Spain, had coach loads of Cardinals. The English Cardinal had no prospect at all of ever becoming Pope. England was doomed eternally to be ruled in many aspects of law and life right out of OF the Vatican. Henry VIII at one point very quietly put out his name as a candidate for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, ostensibly the political leader of the Roman Catholic world. This office was mostly political but required a blessing from the Pope, his cardinals, and all his councilors at the Vatican. This ambition, again, was ultimately without hope. From the standpoint of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the leaders of its European ruling nations, Henry VIII was only the minor king of an isolated, barbaric Island. He only rated one cardinal, and was all but cut off from European society.
There was also the matter of England’s Papal representative, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey himself.
Henry VIII’s mode of operation was to exploit the genius of others to his own benefit. From his earliest days as king, Henry VIII allowed Wolsey the post of Lord Chancellor, and he ran most of Henry’s government policy until 1529 when he was arrested, tried under some random, conveniently trumped-up charge, and died mysteriously in custody in 1530. (Probably because Henry didn’t feel at that point he could just behead a cardinal without going to hell.) This remained Henry VIII’s general manner of administration throughout his reign.
Henry was educated, insightful, discerning, and in most ways very wise—just managerially lazy. He had up to this point only tended to stay fixed on any given matter of state for brief periods. He preferred to monitor the work of others in this regard, and if they got in his way or created significant problems for him, there was always some way to get rid of them permanently. Unlike his father, Henry VIII was not frugal at all. He was instead a spendthrift who genuinely appreciated fine art, music, craftsmanship, architecture, and all the things a good civilization can bring a very wealthy man. He entertained all of Europe and created gardens and palaces. He hosted sporting contests and spectacles to overwhelm his high-ranking visitors from abroad. Well into his first marriage he remained a conventional, pious family man and a popular king.
In 1516 Pope Julius II declared a League (union to defeat) between the Holy Roman Empire and France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai Julius II wanted the French out of Italy. The French of course, were all Roman Catholics, and the French cardinals some of the most devoted to the Pope. Politically speaking however, the French controlled most of Italy and the Vatican itself. This had grown stifling and unacceptable to the Holy See.
Henry VIII joined in the fun, but unfortunately had to back out of the fight prematurely. This was not due to a dissatisfaction with the notion of liberating the Pope, or lack of military success. It was because the cost of the adventure and the way Cardinal Wolsey had ruthlessly extorted and bled taxes and coerced “loans” from nobles and peasantry alike had soon led to a revolt at home that Henry had to deal with. The League involvement cost Henry VIII a fortune, gained him nothing but a bit of sport, and made hellacious political strife in his kingdom.
As the years went by, Henry came to see that Cardinal Wolsey manipulated English foreign and domestic policy to benefit Wolsey and Rome first and foremost. England’s foreign policy went back and forth between France, Europe, and all around the various sides of the Holy Roman Empire’s quarrels almost at the cardinal’s will, based mostly upon the concerns of the Vatican. By the time King Henry VIII was personally annoyed with him, Wolsey had centralized the English national government and extended the authority of national courts into all local regions of the kingdom. These were courts which Wolsey then essentially dictated according to his personal desires as well. He ran the original Star Chamber. He compelled the rich, the nobles to make loans to the central government to pay for his Pope’s foreign adventure wars, and became the hated enemy of the wealthy of all classes because of his overtly ostentatious living. Wolsey was running foreign and domestic policy and the English legal system at his own pleasure, under direct supervision of Rome.
Eventually, Wolsey’s tax and other compulsory funding sources were all tapped out, and he had to tell the king the treasury was empty. Wolsey’s presentation went something like this: “Gee Sire, I’ve done my best to manage the budget, but you’ve spent years and years in outrageous, unbridled spending, and we’re going to have to do something serious about raising taxes and other income… “
The king’s reaction went something like this: “Hey, why didn’t you mention this before? And what about all those lands and properties and loot you’ve got there? Seems to me you’re richer than I am at this point! And what do you mean my noble peers and the wealthy merchant classes all hate me because they’ve been bled dry and can’t be asked to pay any more in taxes for fear of another revolt and an attempt to dethrone me? What do you mean your fiscal extravagance and stifling taxation has killed my economy and we are now in a major financial depression? I seem to be really shafted here and you seem to be at fault Your Eminence. Hmmm…what do you think I should do about this problem Cardinal?”
By this time Catherine of Aragon had given Henry VIII a male heir. But the child died soon after birth. She had also given birth to a living heir, Mary Tudor I, AKA “Bloody Mary,” who would be so-tagged when she finally gained the throne and brutally undid all the things Henry VIII had eventually done to break away from the Roman Church. (Reversal and retaliation was one of the main problems with Henry VIII’s self-justifying theories regarding a king’s right to rule by God’s manifest will. But let’s not get too far ahead of the story.)
So, coming into 1529, Henry wasn’t happy with merely a female heir. Only a male heir could secure the Tudor dynasty. No Queen had ever ruled England without her reign ending in war, revolt, split political factions and family disaster. Henry began to insist upon another marriage and ordered Wolsey to free him from Catherine, claiming apparently sincerely, that he was cursed by the prophesy in Leviticus.
Now, not only had Wolsey blown the treasury, but England’s lone-duck cardinal found himself unable to cajole, beg, reason or otherwise extort an annulment out of the Vatican. What had been dispensed with had dispensed with–Leviticus or not. Pope’s don’t back up and have a “re-think.” This time Wolsey had no help from Henry’s powerful in-laws in Spain. The situation drove home just how ineffectual Henry’s crummy little cardinal was and how little influence his throne really had with Rome and Europe.
Henry VIII for the most part was a pious man with a sincere respect for the Church, but only in a schizophrenic sort of way. He also knew damned well that the Pope was little more than just another Italian prince and most of his decisions were just as political has Henry’s own. Henry still felt bound by canon law however, and always put some color of “legality” on every move he made, however warped or asinine it clearly looked to anyone else.
By Wolsey’s end-time, Henry VIII had gone through Pope Julius II and on to Pope Leo X, both good allies. Leo X ironically granted him the title “Defender of the Faith,” for a treatise he authored condemning Martin Luther. After Leo X, Rome blinked and lost a short-lived Pope Adrian I, also a good friend to Henry VIII. As his problems with Catherine of Aragon came to head, Henry was by then dealing with Pope Clement VII. Though Henry VIII was out of it by then, the Papal League against France had gone all askew on the Vatican in the meantime and il Papa was up to his cassock in troubles.
Unfortunately for both Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, the key player in this particular Euro-war drama was the very same Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, formerly of Martin Luther’s little burg, still eagerly making trouble for poor brother Martin and his silly Reformation movement. On the latter the Pope, Charles V and Henry VIII might all agree, but Charles V also happened to be the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s suddenly unwanted wife. Charles V also happened to be holding the Pope hostage. Literally.
Henry got into the Papal League early on, but only momentarily diddled around in France to strategically tie up French troops there while the Vatican could be liberated. Charles V on the other hand, dropped all his holdings and business in Germany, Netherlands, and elsewhere, relocated to his Spanish holdings and prepared to take Italy from the French directly. So, the Pope owed Henry VIII almost nothing, but The Holy Roman Emperor and the Queen of Spain combined were openly taking the side of Henry’s unwanted wife and daughter. In fact, by the time Henry VIII was earnestly pissed off at Cardinal Wolsey for not winning over the Pope, it was clear to the Holy See, that what he was seeing was Charles V routing out the French occupation all the way into the Pope’s front porch with no apparent intention to stop, or leave afterward.
It also didn’t help Clement II that he hadn’t been very supportive of Charles V’s election as Emperor. Clement II got to thinking perhaps it was going to be payback time for the Pope in St. Peter’s Square sometime soon if the Emperor had a mind to go that far. He diplomatically waffled back to make inquiry’s of the French, asking a truce essentially, and asking if they would help in protecting the Vatican at least from Emperor Charles VII.
Timing is everything. You’d think an infallible head of the Church would see it coming, but just as Clement II’s wavering allegiance had been noted by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor defeated his last stand of enemy ranks and there was nothing but open, undefended travel between himself and the Vatican.
The assault on Rome took place on 6 May, 1527, ostensibly due to a demand Charles V had made for a personal audience with the Pope. Clement II either refused or did not reply and instead, holed up with the Swiss Guard and the armies of his various cardinals. (Yes, cardinals had personal armies as did the Pope.) The story goes that Charles V’s weary troops decided to storm the imposing, heavily defended Vatican walls and secure an audience for their Emperor with or without Papal consent. They were led by a fine officer and gentleman, one Duke Charles. The Duke as usual, wore his customary bright white uniform to mark himself in the battle for his men. It also made him an easy target. He was rather quickly shot and killed. Philbert of Chalon took command of the Imperial troops. He was not much of an officer, nor was he a gentleman, but he was about all that was left of a ragged and battle-torn Imperial officer corps.
Charles V’s troops had arrived at the Vatican gates after much fighting on the Pope’s behalf, only to be snubbed by the Pope and actually find he’d been making deals with the very French they’d been called in to drive out. The Imperial troops were thus pretty irritated by the time they made it inside the Holy City. Almost the entire Swiss guard was slaughtered on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. A thousand other defenders of the Holy See who’d survived the invasion initially, were soon brutally executed in the square. Pope Clement VII had escaped to safety however. History does not record whether or not he was thinking very much about Cardinal Wolsey’s great legal arguments, or concerning himself at all with Henry VIII’s “Great Matter.”
On May 8, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a personal enemy of Clement VII, trotted into Vatican City, thinking he’d join in the victory and get some revenge directed at the cardinals and the Pope himself. The Vatican’s armies had recently been sent to perform the sacking of his own lands and properties do to some politically inspired Papal orders. When Colonna got inside however, Colonna was so sickened by the ongoing pillage, rape and plunder that he hid out in his palace with his contingent of a peasant army, protected himself and guests, hosting Roman citizens as they fled the carnage and horror outside his walls.
After three days of mayhem, Philibert ordered his troops to cease sacking activities of any and all sorts. Very few of the soldiery even listened to him. Troops loyal to the Pope arrived from various supporters in Italy, but apparently weren’t very enthusiastic about their Papal defense, because they had no luck overcoming the entirely drunken and disorganized Imperial invaders of the Vatican. Instead, they brokered a deal on 6 June, in which Clement VII surrendered and agreed to pay a very large ransom in exchange for his life. He was forced to concede several important lands and properties to the Holy Roman Empire, meaning Charles V.
This bungling of Clement VII killed the Roman Renaissance, seriously weakened the Papacy’s worldwide image of omnipotence, and untied Charles V‘s hands to stifle the Reformation in Germany—particularly via bringing political, financial, and threatened military force against the German princes allied with Luther. It was a bit embarrassing religiously for the Holy Roman Emperor to have taken the Pope prisoner and held him hostage, but politically it worked out swell for Charles V.
About the sack of Rome, Martin Luther remarked:
“Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther” (LW 49:169).
And so it came to be, In the context of all this Holy Roman lunacy and all of England’s domestic problems, that the former autocratic friend and confidant to King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, was arrested and suffered a mysterious death in custody. This not only made Wolsey’s domestic critics happy and deflected blame from the king, but it was a warning to the Pope and to the Roman clergy of England regarding the likely outcome of disagreeing with the king’s desires particularly in “The King’s Great Matter.”
With Wolsey gone, Henry VIII took complete control of everything that went on in his court and kingdom. He chose mostly however, to ignore most of the political squabbles or daily civil matters of ruling his government, and instead pressured and begged one Christian authority after the other for some acceptable way out of his marriage.
One of the solutions to Henry VIII’s problem–speaking of Mormons–was suggested by numerous sources: Divorce may be prohibited Biblically, but there is no such prohibition in the Bible against taking another wife in addition to the one he was having offspring problems with. In fact, his advisors suggested that another wife was the usual Biblical solution to this very issue of getting issue. Furthermore, to make any claim of God’s condemnation of this custom would be to damn all the ancient prophets as adulterers, fornicators or whoremongers. The Old Testament treated this solution as a matter of course and there was nothing in the New Testament that contradicted it. In fact the New Testament genealogy of Christ Himself made Jesus of Nazareth merely a bastard pretender without a valid principle of plural marriage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_Christianity#Reformation_period
Martin Luther in his examination of the issue wrote:
“I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.”
That was just a bit radical for the king’s thinking. It would create diplomatic difficulties with other nations who observed the Roman custom of taking only one fiscally, or politically arranged wife, and then having sex for love or just sex’s sake alone with anyone or anything you wanted in addition to it. (The Roman custom left clear heirs and made stronger unions between royal houses so fewer assassinations would be encouraged.)
For all the brutality to his nemeses, and his historically exaggerated fits of temper, Henry 
VIII was indeed an enlightened, Roman Catholic man. Beyond his self-delusional end-runs around canon law, he was upright and sensitive to the mood of commoners and nobles alike. He understood the nature of how an economy works, and led a fundamental Tudor revolution in English government structure. Thomas Cromwell is often credited as being the actual driving force behind this movement, but Henry, as I say, was very comfortable with turning the reins of his kingdom over to highly competent, highly principled and reasoned delegates–until of course he found they were failing him or heading him in a direction he didn’t want to go.
(Thomas Cromwell is not to be confused with a later Oliver Cromwell, Thomas’ nominal relative by way of a sister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell Oliver was an evil, Calvinist, regicidal bastard and genocidal mass murderer, who violently re-did the viciously brutal un-doing of her father’s reformed Church that Bloody Mary had just thuggishly un-doodled.)
Thomas Cromwell may have been one of the authors of the “king rules by divine right” theory, but he had also conceived of a British commonwealth that included common participation through Parliament. He did not propose that the king surrendered any authority to houses either of commoners or peers in a house of nobles or lords. He explained the arrangement as using this consent of the common man and the noble man as a way to consolidate the king’s power by popular consent.
Thomas Cromwell drifted into Henry VIII’s chief ministership in 1532. It was a symbiotic gravitation toward reform both of government and religion—both of which went to the heart of the king’s “Great Matter.” After a time of functioning like a noble with the very authority of the king himself minus any titles at all, Henry VIII formally appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls, Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, and then on to Lord Great Chamberlain over the king’s household. Though I’m ahead of the story a bit here, he was also granted very high supervisory roles in the Church in England, that were well above his common caste and layman status.
One of the first things Thomas Cromwell helped get out of the harried Pope Clement II, is approval to appoint a
sympathetic cleric to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest Church authority in England–for that moment anyway. Thomas Cranmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cranmer it was believed had assured Henry and Cromwell that he would have no trouble entertaining any arguments they might make for the annulment of his marriage or divorce of his wife. Cranmer had been in fact previously requested an assignment from the crown to take a religious canvass of Church scholars all over Europe seeking insight on the king’s “Great Matter.” Oddly enough, this led Cranmer to traipsing about with the realm of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who, while kidnapping the Pope, was also hunting down Lutherans and the very Reformers Cranmer and team were trying to interview.
Thomas More at that moment was Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. They were all still Roman Catholics mind you, but he too was keen to make this universal Christian scholastic canvas, to take some heat off his own backside. More you may know was a very famous Roman Catholic martyr, who was tortured to death later by Henry VIII because he would not openly acknowledge Henry’s universal authority over the Church in England. While the traditional story is best known via Hollywood’s finest Roman Catholic directors, Thomas More merely suffered the same agonizing death he’d enthusiastically inflicted upon a great many others when he was in a position to make the religious charges against his rivals. More’s deadly removal opened up the post of Lord Chancellor so that the king’s new pal, Thomas Cromwell could take it.
While in Europe’s religious academic centers, Thomas Cranmer discovered in person this thing called “Reformers,” including whole civilizations built on the ideas of Martin Luther. Cranmer found their theories very promising and had many lengthy conversations with them centered upon scripture and Church tradition. While in this process of fraternizing with heretics, Thomas Cromwell and King Henry were selling Cranmer to Clement II. The Pope had no idea what Cranmer’s travels or studies were about. Therefore, being imprisoned and besieged with his own problems, seeing no obvious objections, Clement VII threw Henry VIII a bone and approved of Cranmer’s elevation to Archbishop.
In and out of the Church, Cromwell made many enemies of the rich and noble for rising too quickly above them in the king’s court. Though Cranmer was on his side, the rest of the Church in particular had serious cause to dislike him. What was really going on under the Roman Church’s nose between Cromwell, Cranmer, and their new friend the king, was the English Reformation.
In the parliamentary sessions of 1532, Cromwell had his first go as Chief Minister. He pushed through measures that cut off the main sources of Papal revenue, transferred all Church income to the king, and gave the Church’s legislative powers back to the crown as well. In short, all lands, titles, property and authority was removed from the Church and transferred to the king. The following year he passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals which cut off English legal appeal to Rome—which incidentally meant the English Church could grant an annulment for example, just coincidentally, on its own authority, and nobody could whine to the Vatican about its validity:
Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.
Cromwell used the label “Empire” for England in an innovative manner. Henry VIII was not like a “Holy Roman Emperor.” That was an elected office. Or, an emperor could also claim that title by ruling more than one kingdom. Cromwell’s Act declared England to be an Empire on its own, free from “the authority of any foreign potentates.” England thus declared itself an independent sovereign nation-state no longer under the jurisdiction of the Pope.[10]
Edward Foxe, Cranwell’s close friend had actually coordinated their “Great Matter” research expedition, and their team published Collectanea Satis Copiosa , The Determinations, which gave historical and theological support for the argument that the king exercised supreme jurisdiction within his realm. This didn’t directly make an argument on the annulment issue of course, but it removed Clement II from the debate along with any future Pope, and satisfied themselves at least that they weren’t going to go to hell by telling the Pope to butt out of English life, law, and religion.
Cromwell and Cranmer crafted a very smooth but revolutionary system of events. Archbishop Warham the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury, died in August, 1532. Cranmer was appointed his successor. Cranmer had a few alleged problems like a wife and a few other things, but Clement II was literally the prisoner of Charles V at the time, he had no idea what was coming, and it seemed like it would shut England up for a while. Clement VII signed all the appropriate wavers. On 25 January, 1533, before Cranmer had been consecrated to his post, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his next victim–er–wife, were married by Cranmer in a quiet ceremony. On 15 April 1533, Cranmer received his consecration and officially took his post as Archbishop of Canterbury. On 23 May, parliament, having already forbidden any appeals to Rome on pain of death, declared Henry to be supreme authority in both Church and State. Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid and she was sent packing. On 28 May, Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn valid. On 1June Anne was crowned. On 7 September Anne gave birth to a daughter. (Queen Elizabeth I in the future.) On 11 July 1533, Clement II issued a Bull of excommunication against Henry VIII, King of England, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. This was ignored.
While Cromwell had led the argument to make Henry VIII the head of the English Church. (This was effected by the Act of Supremacy of 1534.) Henry VIII almost immediately delegated the Church powers he thus gained, to Cromwell, making him the new “Vice Regent in Spirituals.” Cromwell then presided over the Dissolution of the Monasteries which began in the winter if 1536. His title morphed into a higher position, Vicar General. This gave him power as the highest judge in all ecclesiastical matters and created himself as a single unifying institution over the then two divisions or provinces of the English Church (Canterbury and York.) For Cranmer’s part, he did not seem to resent this encroachment and looked upon Cromwell as a junior partner and quite the Church scholar. Plus, Cromwell did most of the hard work and Cranmer could keep his head down and out of the politics.
Cromwell created a professional caste of bureaucrats and made the tax system more efficient. He was the architect of the unification of English and Welsh laws, and strengthened the English government of Ireland. He became a patron of English intellectual humanists (not godless secular humanists, but godly clerical humanists) that Cromwell rallied in his promotion of the English Reformation through print, using the printing press as a new communication and teaching tool in a major way for the first time in England.
Thomas Cromwell probably crossed the line with his antagonists both in court and amongst the commoners, when he was created Baron Cromwell on 9 July, 1536, became 300th Knight of the Garter in 1537, and Earl of Essex on 17 April 1540. The peasants thought of him as one of their own…lording it over them. And the lords thought of him as a peasant…lording it over them. Roman Catholics, who had many secret loyalists in court and around the kingdom still, wanted him dead, as did all the Monks and Holy Orders he broke up and seized. The peasants these Church institutions had been feeding and healing and caring for all those centuries, now deprived of any support at all, really really hated him. A popular revolt in fact, ensued after the dissolution of the Monasteries. Very large peasant and middle-class armies were raised and even nobles seemed sympathetic. After much violence, Henry VIII coaxed some 300 representatives of the various unhappy factions into coming down for a meeting of truce and settlement. True to his nature, as they stood in the the meeting, he had them all arrested and killed in grisly ways as a warning to others with similar plans to impede the resolution of his “Great Matter.” There were no further “popular” insurrections under Henry VIII.
I might as well mention that Henry the Eighth had six wives (as if anyone would not know this) and all of these fated marriages followed a fairly common trail way off the happy path to marital bliss, into a hellish home life ending in misery and death. (But then who’s marriage doesn’t eh guys?) He made truce with some, banished some after annulment, those he couldn’t annul, he just killed. When his second try at marriage failed for instance, and Anne Boleyn turned into a shrew he didn’t much like any more, this only accentuated the fact that she couldn’t produce a proper son either. Cromwell, with very little coaxing, supported Henry VIII in disposing of Anne Boleyn and replacing her with Jane Seymour. He engineered charges of treason and had Boleyn’s head chopped off. Seymour died giving birth to the future Edward VI and she was never crowned.
Though he’d gotten his heir, Henry was bored as a single man and so was counseled by Cromwell to marry Anne of Cleves, a princess from the Duchy of Cleves, which is an area in Lutheran Germany. This was arranged sight-unseen upon the word of trusted proponents such as Cromwell. In this coupling, Cromwell hoped to put the English Reformation ball back in play, since he’d just met with a fiasco concerning the publication of the Six Articles.
The Six Articles effort was intended as a new statement of faith cooked up between he and Archbishop Cranmer and some German scholarly supporters they’d invited to England for a convention lasting seven months. In this they painstakingly drafted up six basic beliefs to be proposed for the Anglican Church, centering around Luther’s Confession of Augsburg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg_Confession They were met with staunch resistance from English clerics who wanted to part with Rome alright, but desired to join with the Greek Church, or Eastern Orthodox as it is now called, rather than the upstart Lutherans. Henry VIII was himself still leery of Lutheran ideas, particularly the whole democratic nature of “voting” on things , like the commoners choosing their own beliefs and clergy. Cranmer and Cromwell’s Six Articles went to parliament, and the combined English religious and secular parliamentarians entirely re-wrote the Six Articles into six articles exactly like their Roman Catholic equivalents, under the same title, Six Articles. This was approved unanimously. Henry VIII later wrote The King’s Book defending most of Roman Catholic dogma, including transubstantiation and the Six Articles.
Cranmer did however, eventually start authoring a specific set of uniquely English Church beliefs that were eventually very well received, including his Book of Common Prayer, his 10 Articles, and his 42 Articles, under Edward VII, which tried to be a complete expression of the official faith of the Church of England, and others. Thomas Cranmer was tortured into a retraction of his Reformationist beliefs under the revenge-driven Roman Catholic Mary I, but when released he gradually went back to speaking his true conscience and was executed for it.
When Mary I died at the age of 42 in an angst-filled depression of hysterical pregnancies and other psychotic breaks, her half-sister, the staunchly anti-Catholic Elizabeth I took the throne and published the 39 Articles (of faith) most Mormons think are so relevant to themselves. They aren’t. These primarily distinguish the relationship between the English Church and the Roman Church—having been written after a lot of turmoil and bloodshed to finally settle the whole English/Roman feud. Elizabeth’s 39 Articles most clearly illustrate how the Church of England has chosen to pursue a path of least resistance between its Roman Catholic roots and the Protestant and Reformationist soil in which it first grew.
But again, back in Henry’s time almost no changes were made from Roman Catholic canon or dogma and even his contrived divorces and annulments, his formation of an independent Church State, were all painted in the tones of One Catholic and Universal Church. Even Protestant Reformers, particularly those openly questioning his marital habits, were persecuted under his rule, including the famous John Wycliffe. Henry VIII never even embraced Luther’s whole thesis that the Pope, or certainly the greater Church structure of professional clergy, was invalid. He just side-stepped the issue.
Any hope of actual “Protestant” or “Reformation” activities in Henry VIII’s reign came to a sudden halt when Thomas Cromwell’s Anne of Cleves recommendation became an embarrassing debacle. King Henry finally, frustratedly, mentioned to Cromwell that he had not consummated the marriage, did not care to, and asked if Cromwell could get him out of it legally somehow. His reasons seemed centered upon her crude, repulsive, Germanness. Historical evidence and testimony don’t confirm that she was particularly unattractive however. In any case, Henry apparently felt awkwardly if not perilously stuck in the marriage even if a legal means could be concocted to escape it. It represented an invaluable union with the wealthy and powerful German Protestant Princes, nobles, and merchant classes, who Henry VIII could not afford to insult. They kept Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire at bay. Now that England was a heretical kingdom this was a big consideration. Luckily, knowing which way the wind blew between herself and the king, Cleves confessed that the marriage had never been consummated and Henry gave her money and Anne Boleyn’s old manor house to live quietly out her days away from court.
Cromwell’s opponents, notably the Duke of Norfolk took this moment of Henry’s angst to poison the king’s mind against Cromwell. It’s not entirely certain why Henry went along with Cromwell’s opponents in the court, but on 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell was dragged out of a council meeting and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he remained under a sort of protection by Henry VIII, until his marriage to Anne of Cleves could be wrangled into an annulment without another European war breaking out. This came at great cost politically, financially, and lowered the world prestige of England and King Henry VIII.
Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill 28 July, 1540, essentially as Henry VIII went happily on his way to marry Catherine Howard. Cromwell’s head was boiled and placed on a spike on London Bridge, facing away from the city.
About eight months later, Henry VIII had become wracked with grief and accused his ministers of making false accusations against Cromwell. He bemoaned Cromwell’s execution till the day he died. Edward Hall, a chronicler in the day, recorded this about Cromwell’s downfall:
Many lamented but more rejoiced, and specially such as either had been religious men, or favored religious persons; for they banqueted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that that day had been seven year before; and some fearing lest he should escape, although he were imprisoned, could not be merry. Others who knew nothing but truth by him both lamented him and heartily prayed for him. But this is true that of certain of the clergy he was detestably hated, & specially of such as had borne swynge, and by his means was put from it; for in dead he was a man that in all his doings seemed not to favour any kind of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride of some prelates, which undoubtedly, whatsoever else was the cause of his death, did shorten his life and procured the end that he was brought unto.[17]
Catherine Howard, who Henry VIII called his, “rose without a thorn,” was executed a couple of years later allegedly for adultery, which, in her position of Queen of England, was treason.
I suppose this chapter of Christianity’s development should have been about Thomas Cromwell. Or Thomas Cranmer. But Henry VIII wore the crown, and history gives him all the glory. He did, after all, create the first protestant Nation-State, even if it was little more than Roman Catholicism with an English brand on it’s flank, and an English king wearing the Pope’s hat.
