Posts Tagged ‘heresy’
Mormon Wars Part 4: Politics, the Other Religion
Loyal Latter-day Saints keep telling themselves that plural marriage was withdrawn from them by the Lord in order to save the church. Mormons today however, euphemize, obfuscate and blur the real Christianized, federal tyranny of that situation however. The whole truth is, the Utah State constitution specifically outlaws plural marriage. It was a condition for statehood dictated by Congress. Quite in spite of this enlightened century’s new, brown, black, red, yellow and tan little Mormons in distant countries in which plural marriage is the social and legal norm, the lily-white, American Mormon church leadership is still parked long-term in Utah, and cannot condone or author any statement along the lines that plural marriage–the patriarchal order–is a valid, Biblical concept. This is so even if they do not permit its institution in the church as a practice, not even in countries abroad where it may 
be entirely legal and socially dominant. This puts the Mormon church in the ironic and dogmatically awkward position of being the only “Christian” missionary effort in the Muslim or developing, animist/polygamist worlds that wholeheartedly agrees with them on the principle of plural marriage, yet must instead tell potential converts that they cannot join the church because they have more than one wife. The American punishment for advocating any such Biblical correctness under US state and federal laws, is the dissolution of the LDS corporate charter, and the confiscation of every lick of money and property the LDS church owns in the state of Utah. That’s for openers. The LDS church is literally held hostage by the federal government even today.
The federal government directly owns or controls some 80-90% of the state of Utah to this day. Salt Lake County, its most populated area, has struggled to maintain a majority Mormon representation since the mid-1980’s, and Salt Lake City itself has an even lower percentage of active, genuine Mormons in it. The concept of a Utah “Mormon” rebellion or secession from the United States of America, is rather unlikely–even if the Mormon hierarchy actually ever wanted that. Though federal intrusion into territorial and then state political matters began as a crusade against Mormonism, it remains however, the nature of the federal government, that once it takes some portion of your rights or property, it never gives it back. Once the federal government sets a precedent of subverting Constitutional rights in one area, in one circumstance, with one set of people, it relentlessly wedges itself through that little crack in the nation’s protective door of Constitutionalized rights and liberties, until it is forced open wide and the feds rush in to take all the loot, all the booze, all the women, and all the fun. (Figuratively, and literally.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_the_late_19th_century
http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geog/rrt/part3/chp6/48.htm
Mormonism had to choose between statehood, or taking a daily beating while slowly being choked to death. The Mormons had to decide between defending the Biblical practice of plural marriage, sustaining the way of all the Biblical patriarchs, or achieving some measure of national acceptance and a long-term truce with the Christian Nation. Mormonism chose statehood, the truce, and some level of American toleration. In effect, any 
time LDS authorities are forced by clear Biblical scripture to teach that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, all the great Biblical prophets, took multiple wives and did so with God’s blessing, it could be considered a crime against the United States of America. For more biting irony, in today’s world, there are at present, a score and better of these selfsame United States who have authorized the wedding of avowed and practicing sodomites, or even surgically-altered, pseudo-sodomites. I don’t want to burst anyone’s delusional Bible bubble, but sodomy is indeed specifically banned as an affront to God in the Bible. God hadn’t apparently even considered the transgendered issue, though it would be safe to assume it’s implied under the same clause. I’m not saying stone them all. I’m just saying that plural marriage on the other hand, is clearly Biblically sanctioned, expressly ordained specifically and repeatedly by God, and practiced by the greatest Biblical prophets.
Sodomy, and sodomic marriage is legal. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses would all go to prison for life, their property would be confiscated and their funds would be seized. I’m not judging. I’m just sayin’…
Admittedly, “polygamy” is but one principle, one little device, a gimmick, that Christianity rigged against the Mormons as a constant and ongoing reminder of who really is the master of American religion. It’s not a big enough hindrance to destroy the Mormon church as an institution, but it causes enough pain to tame the heretical Mormon hordes and let them know who’s in charge. Mormonism has had to go-along to get-along on that one issue. They had it crammed down their throats and were forced to swallow it. That’s how federalized, nationalized Christianity “got” Mormonism. That’s how they stuck it to Joe Smith’s rabble in the end. But outlawing plural marriage is not really the point of anti-Mormon legislation or LDS persecution in the first place. It wasn’t even a factor from the first persecutions connected to Joseph Smith’s “First Vision,” his production of the Book of Mormon, and well into Smith’s assassination at Carthage. Barely an inkling of the plural marriage issue had been leaked to the public at the time of Smith’s murder. Indeed, that first dribble of a leak was the whole point of destroying the Nauvoo Expositor. But the Expositor and plural marriage wasn’t the reason Joseph Smith was killed, and it wasn’t the real reason the United States of America eventually sent an Army out to Utah to get Mormonism under federal control. No, the reason for Christian America’s systematic enabling of Mormon persecution was the Mormon voting block.
Vol. V Springfield, Friday, November 13, 1840. No. 37.
WHIG VERACITY.
The Missouri Republican and Quincy Whig both assert that the Hon. Richard M. Young and Stephen A. Douglass, Esq., were at Nauvoo, in Hancock county, on the day of the election, and it is insinuated by these Federal prints that they “induced two hundred Mormon voters to erase the name of A. Lincoln from the Whig electoral ticket, and substitute the name of James H. Ralston in its stead.” Now, for part of the above, every citizen of Springfield, can answer for its falsity. Mr. Douglass was in this place on the day of the election near the polls all day.
The Quincy Whig speaks of the erasure of Mr. Lincoln’s name as “a trick played upon “two hundred Mormon voters.” We do not view it in this light. It is very certain that Mr. Lincoln runs near 200 votes behind his ticket in Hancock county, and it is equally as certain that Judge Ralston runs near 200 ahead of his ticket, but this the voters had a perfect right to do. The “Mormon voters,” as well as all other voters have the right to vote for whomsoever they please, and no editor has the right to insinuate that any voter is governed by improper motives, or has been “tricked.” as this Whig editor calls it….
Now, the dynamics of these initial courtships between Gentile politicians and the Mormon vote were such that the winners immediately realized the Mormons voted as a block, and winning this block would determine the 
whole election. Soon, the losers realized that only by turning the entire populace against the Mormons on any and all levels possible would neutralize this phenomenon. This was done by Satanizing, villainizing, and conspiricizing them, first along religious grounds, and then more broadly, along the lines of a threat to personal “freedoms.” Each target constituency was preached a cleverly customized threat message: the pious were told that Mormons would persecute and soon destroy your favorite local churches. The rowdy were cautioned that Mormons would not let you drink on Sunday or ride through town shooting your guns in the air, and planned to close all the whore houses and saloons. Whatever precious “freedom” you feared losing most, that was what the Mormons were billed as trying to take from you. It didn’t matter if on the one hand, Mormonism was alleged to stifle the practice of your favorite vice, or on the other, represented a looming imposition upon your personal virtue. The ploy was personalized for each special interest group, and worked across the whole social, political, and ideological spectrum.
Mitt Romney, at this writing, a current leading Republican presidential candidate, is on the receiving end of heaps of old-style anti-Mormon rhetoric. Essentially, the Tea Party/Religious Right types still seem to prefer anyone but a Mormon, even though Romney consistently polls as the only Republican candidate capable of decidedly beating his incumbent opponent, their hated, Godless Commie, and possible closet Muslim, president Barack Hussein Obama. Romney’s first go at a 
presidential candidacy in the last election found his Republican primary opponents rallying the Religious Right against him as a possible anti-Christ. Late in the game when it became clear that Republican, Born-Again, fellow-challenger, Mike Huckabee, was falling off the charts, rather than cut a deal with his third-place standing and adding his gravitas to the strong, second-running Romney for a VP shot on Romney’s ticket, the ordained minister, pastor Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and direct legacy of the original Mormon-hating Tennessee hillbilly rednecks, basically told Mitt to feck his smiley Mormon arse off. The reason for this should be obvious to both the Christian and the Mormon observer if you’ve been paying any attention to my ramblings thus far. The vast majority of Mike Huckabee’s church or political constituency, the two of which are one and the same, devoutly believe Mitt Romney is a cultist who worships the devil. They don’t want a cultist in the White House. Sanctioning a Mormon attempt at taking over a Christian America in any capacity would be the kiss of death for our hip and happenin’ Pastor Mike. Even dealing with a Mitt Romney as VP candidate on a Huckabee ticket would only convince Huckabee’s hillbilly faithful that the Mormons plan to snuff Pastor Pastor Mikey right after the election and put Mitt in the Oval Office by force of violence.
Rather than taking a Romney/Huckabee team to the Republican National Convention that almost certainly would have won the nomination, Mike Huckabee took a talk-show gig with Fox News instead, where he could hobnob with his 
important Christian guests, hang out with famous country music singers, and impose his bass guitar upon a litany of motel-lounge-level pickup bands. This consolidated the front-running Republican ticket into the team of John McCain, doddering old RhINO, and an unelectable, but busty, Born-Again Sarah Palin. The McCain/Palin team decidedly lost the contest for the Republican Party in the general election.
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2226.cfm
While Mitt Romney takes crap from the Left about his smarmy Mormon ways and insipid personal purity, the Right denounces Mitt Romney as a “progressive” and a “liberal.” This sort of flies in the face of the Right’s other claims that he’s part of a creeping Mormon fascism plotting to take over the nation and subjugate all of its Christians, but it works for them. Mitt’s father before him, George Romney, in spite of a good start, a good reputation, tremendous popularity during his long run as governor of Michigan, and a well-funded organization, was wiped right out of his 1968 attempt at the presidency, for similar reasons.
In Mitt’s father’s case, the LDS leadership seemed as critical of his politics as did the Religious Right. The hawks in and out of his own church beat him up severely for claiming the Viet Nam war was unnecessary and the product of “brainwashing” by the military-industrial complex, intimating that the “domino theory” was essentially a vanity of the Right Wing power structure. George Romney was square into the Civil Rights Movement on top of this, which gained him derision again from the Southern rednecks and Northern “Conservatives,” who still make up a large part of the Republican base. George Romney also took a slap in the face and a warning from apostle Delbert L Stapley to shut up about advancing the cause of the negroes, else the Lord might strike him down. Still, throughout his political career, particularly as a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, a state with 700,000 negroes in it, his opponents spread the rumor that Mormons believed God had declared negroes to be second-class citizens, doomed to be eternal servants—a tactic remarkably effective on a national and even state level given his open disagreement with LDS leadership on the subject and his fervent pro-civil rights activities. He was also constantly jabbed by the young and the hip, for talking and thinking like a preacher.
Romney’s campaign did often focus on his core beliefs; a Romney billboard in New Hampshire read “The Way To Stop Crime Is To Stop Moral Decay”.[129][140] Dartmouth College students gave a bemused reaction to his morals message, displaying signs such as “God Is Alive and Thinks He’s George Romney”.[131]
While George was far less beaten up by his detractors on purely Mormon terms than his son Mitt is today, the whole Mormon issue so complicated George’s national aspirations that even with the most successful run as governor in the history of the state of Michigan, he was out of the Republican presidential contest bef
ore it began in earnest. George Romney was also a victim of the Cleon Skousenite, Red-baiting, McCarthy-era, Right Wing, takeover of LDS culture in the late 50’s and 1960’s. George Romney was almost singular in his distain for the period’s Birch invasion, which formed an LDS Bircher aristocracy that took over both the church and the Republican Party. (Anyone who told Klingon Skousen and ignorant Utah hicks like Delbert Stapley where to stuff their theories is OK by me.) While it is often contended that his religion had nothing to do with George Romney’s failure to win the Republican presidential nomination, the fact of the matter is, the Right Wing of his own Republican party was so busy slapping him around for his enlightened social views that they never got down to openly castigating any of his specifically religious views.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSdSiBehQpI
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/24/delbert_stapley.pdf
https://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/11.3Lythgoe1968-74701cc5-b48e-4116-bf7b-8a43e674056f.pdf
Even though the present Republican sentiment from the Right is, “anyone but Mitt,” despite the favorable polls and a smooth running campaign that has escaped the
bumbling, scandal-ridden, mouth-flapping, miss-stepping of his fellows in the primary race so far, Mitt Romney could have it far worse. Reed Smoot, the first Mormon senator from Utah State, even after a landslide election, went through years of grilling by Congressional committees, refusing to sustain his election and grant him a seat, though he was allowed to be seated silently, during the debates, and eventually won a sustaining vote from Congress. BH Roberts, noted LDS historian, some years previously, was elected to the House of Representatives, and in his case, he was never allowed to be seated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Smoot_hearings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Roberts
It would be insightful to recall that it wasn’t until 1960, with the election of an incredibly likeable and popular John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a war-hero, and American son of a beloved bootlegger, so respected and just plain 
adored by the general population, that the nation’s Protestant bias against Roman Catholics was finally overcome enough to elect a Papist to the presidency.
True, the sort of quibbling hassle the Christian Nation gives Mitt Romney, or even a Jon Huntsman or Harry Reid today, is nothing like the severe persecution of the old days. However, many of modern Christian excuse-makers use phraseology like, “The myth of Persecuted Mormon Innocence,” to mitigate their forefathers’ persecution of the early Latter-day Saints, by suggesting that first, Mormons don’t get persecuted any more, and second, that back when Latter-day Saints were the 
subjects of persecution, they brought it on themselves.
Mormon “Persecution Deniers” first, in reverse order that is, cite a litany of verifiable Mormon retaliations, cleverly omitting the Christian initiatory brutality that almost invariably prompted them. It allows the anti-Mormonist the pretense of honesty. It leaves their rapt Christian audience shivering over their apparently true tales of brutal, but inexplicable Mormon “atrocities.” It’s easy enough to omit the part where the Christians start the fight, and cut to the part where Mormons finish it as they attempt to liberate themselves from Christian oppression. Of course, in that order, it looks like the Mormons are the oppressors and instigators. Moreover, it looks like Mormons just enjoy heaping violence upon good Christians entirely out of the blue. This must be because they’re evil, the gullible Christian audience will conclude. No other explanation seems possible. Thus, these one-sided fables easily seem to prove that Mormons are the very sort of conquering devils they have been promised to be, and are simply out to kill Christians and take all their stuff.
Nauvoo and the Myth of Mormonism’s Persecuted Innocence | Roger Launius’s Blog
http://www.equip.org/articles/the-martyrdom-of-joseph-smith
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/martyr_joseph.htm
http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/jsmartyr.pdf
Even the most honest and “enlightened” of the Christian apologists can’t resist trying to sugar-coat Christian aggression against the early Mormons by pointing out that Jesus would never get pissed off and start a regional war over defending his right to vote like the Mormons did. Jesus, they say, wouldn’t have shot back like Joe Smith did when the mobbers came to butcher Him. As these folks keep pointing out however, Joe Smith is not Jesus Christ. But as I often reply, he doesn’t have to be. The point of my analysis here is that the issue of just who is or isn’t a “true follower of Jesus” is irrelevant. Mormons were, and are, American citizens with Constitutional rights.
Christian aggressors also try to euphemize their instigation of violence against the early Mormons by alluding to vague “mobs,” and writing them off as some far-removed, backslidden, coincidental movement of the offended general population that religious leaders of the day only very reluctantly found associating with their goal to destroy Mormonism. These uncontrollable, inherently violent social cliques they say, are the non-religious portion of “Christian” society, spontaneously responding to Mormon despotism in their own ignorant fashion. Yet, virtually every single mobber to ever attack the Mormons had his name scribbled in the family Bible at birth, had been born and raised a “Christian,” and actual Christian ministers led them in deadly attacks against usually helpless Mormons–even in the regular and volunteer state militias. That’s like Pontius Pilate riding into the garden of Gethsemane with a cohort of troops, sword drawn, hacking his way up to Jesus shouting, “Kill the blasphemer! Death to the heretic!” and when his surrounding followers chop the Savior to pieces in direct obedience to this demand, then, Pilate asks for a bowl of water to wash his hands of the whole 
business.
The presupposition that American citizens have to present a valid Christian passport before being allowed to enter a polling place is the product of an inherent Christian bigotry and disloyalty to Constitutional, Republican government. This notion has little dissipated in American Christian circles to this day. How can it? It is an assumption that constitutes a central and intrinsic part of their religion. Even in the two most recent “Mormon” presidential campaigns, king-makers from the Religious right and candidates pandering to them, have openly stated that America is a Christian nation, and it should have a Christian president at its head. Only a Christian can properly govern a Christian nation they have openly argued, and God has ordained the office of the president be occupied by a disciple of Christ.
Even more mind boggling than the modern Christian’s continued ignorance of Constitutional principles, is the conspiratorial Christian brushoff of Joseph Smith’s execution by a Christian, clergy-sanctioned mob. Christian apologists continue to suggest that unpopular religions, like Mormons, Moonies, Hindus, Muslims, other non-Christians and heretics, have no expectation of due process in a Constitutionally Christian legal and political system. It is quite natural for the general population to rise up and kill you if you’re not flying the right gospel flag they maintain. This is your fault for not properly confining your belief system to Christian orthodoxy. What else did you expect? they pose, as they excuse the violence of their Christian ancestors—against Mormons or Indians or any of the traditional Christian “threats’ to Godly rule. Christians who confess their part in the assassination of Joseph Smith at all, do so as if it all evened-out since Smith was arrogant enough to arm himself. He knew he had it coming—he even had the gall to shoot back at the lynch mob his Christian neighbors had rallied up and mustered together to do him in. It just proves what a faker he was. Modern Christianity, with a straight face and sober resolve, openly portrays Joseph Smith’s attempt to defend himself against a mob of Christian killers as a vain and petty act of selfishness, or even a vainglorious rebellion against Christian justice.
Naturally, nobody describes Joseph Smith’s assassins as “Christians.” Mormons don’t, because they still think
they are Christians, and that would only tarnish the name. Well, the name has been well-tarnished for two-thousand and more years so far: what’s a little more tarnish going to hurt? Christians weasel out of the mob’s thirst for Mormon blood and gore by declaring that the “mobs” obviously couldn’t be “Christians” because Christians don’t act like that. Well, sorry, but that’s exactly how they do act. Frequently. Repeatedly. Perpetually.
While everyone on all sides thinks it would be better to move along and get along, I wonder who they all think killed Joseph Smith then? Was it the large Muslim population of the American Midwest of the 19th century that rose up to stifle his religious rights? Was it the rabbis of the Northeast that screamed for Mormonism’s death from synagogue to synagogue? Was it the three Hindus and the couple of hundred Buddhists in the region that were behind all this murder and destruction?
No, it was the Christians.
Mormons as a people, have never been pacifists. We should all get that straight. That’s never been a tenet of the religion. A Mormon will take a bullet in the head for Jesus if it comes down to it, but all things being equal, a Mormon will earnestly try to dodge that bullet, and put one in the head of the guy shooting at them instead. Mormons figure, it’s really the guy starting the fight that Jesus would want taken out of this world.
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_s_patton_2.html#ixzz1df4cOHmd
Christian apologists who make the “myth of innocence” argument are essentially saying that Christians should be able to poke Mormons in the eye with a sharp stick at will, and if the Mormons don’t cheerfully offer a clear 
shot of the other one in response, it proves they’re frauds. I’m sure that makes sense to a Christian, since Christians have been poking out the eyes of heretics and accused sinners for millennia with impunity. They believe it’s their God-given right.
I shouldn’t need to refresh us all on the several Crusades, on Cromwell, on the Highland purges, on the Emperor Constantine’s vision of a crucifix glowing in the sky, and the words that came to him, “in this sign conquer,” after which he subjected most of the known world to his own personally defined and enforced “Christianity.” If you want to understand atrocities by Mormons upon Christians, you can’t pick the narrative up 1857 years into the story. You can’t automatically assume the Christians are the heroes of the tale, as you have been trained since a toddler in Sunday School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_hoc_signo_vinces
Christians were a despised and persecuted minority for their first three centuries. Christians were blamed for 
burning Rome and the same sort of general disloyalty Mormons, Jews, and other persecuted religious minorities have been labeled with for ages. Mormons by contrast are barely two centuries into that progression, but it’s not the Pagans in charge of the government this time around, it’s the Christians. And for a Christian, payback is a bitch. Christian payback is in fact, an almost two-thousand-year-old tradition, handed down from father to son to son to son to son….
In its short history on this planet, Mormonism has a handful of angry frontier dustups to apologize for. This much is undeniable. So I’ll just do my apologizing at now, on behalf of all Mormanity: Sorry.
Christian America broke its toe kicking Mormonism’s arse for almost two-hundred years. The Mormons put up a good fight, but in the end they got slapped silly and cried “uncle.” That’s essentially what the record shows. Go ahead. Blame your broken toe on the Mormons. Times were hard. Mormon arses were harder. And you started it. Now, you guys, Christianity, how about apologizing for your 2011 years of wholesale genocide all around the globe? No? Not willing to make that moral comparison? Sound a little too morally un-equivalent for you?
I refer you to: http://bible.cc/matthew/7-3.htm, a little advice from our beloved Matthew about a mote and a beam.
The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor by Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo city council was clearly the legal match that lit up the Illinois Mormon war in 1844. Of this action, Illinois Governor Thomas Ford, advised Smith that they would have been better off organizing a mob (the same sort of mob that killed Smith shortly afterward) and effect his purpose of silencing the newspaper in that fashion, rather than by putting the color of the law onto it. Frankly, that’s the way you got things done in the frontier at the time. You fought it out. You came to blows if necessary. If that didn’t work you shot it out.
America is fine with hero-worshipping the poor frontier settler against the railroad barons, the cattle barons, the oil barons, who stole their land, murdered, oppressed, and drove them out. The theater crowd rises to its feet and applauds when the little band of immigrants rises up and defends itself against the big bosses, their hired gunslingers and thugs. Put Joe Smith and a small settlement of Mormons in the hero’s role, and suddenly the movie isn’t so popular.
Public opinion is easily swayed, and today’s notion of a biased press has nothing on the outright advocacy press that prevailed in Joseph Smith’s day. Mormon attempts to mail reports and journals outside their own immediate areas of control were systematically put down by universal loss or destruction of their mailings, and then when carted personally to outlying regions and distributed, Mormon newspapers and other documents were utterly destroyed by gangs of persecutors who followed 
minutes behind their distribution efforts. The mob not only did the dirty deeds, but it controlled how the story was told about those deeds.
Reports, records, commentaries on the various Mormon wars and persecutions are not scarce or difficult to obtain today however. Just Google it, as my kids say. 
Unfortunately, Mormon historical records are just so contradictory as to be unhelpful to the naïve and uninitiated. You can pick and choose which you care to believe and make Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or the whole church glow in whatever color light suits your prejudices. And the truth be known, BH Robert’s LDS authorized Comprehensive History of the Church, and The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, do a far better job of factually recording the arguments on all sides than the anti-Mormon efforts, or even allegedly neutral scholars like Fawn Brody, in her No Man Knows My History. But Slogging through Roberts is hard work—lots of footnotes. Lots of actual statements from actual people with actual names, dates, times, witnesses. Actual quotes from actual first-hand notes, letters, publications. Lots of follow-up. Lots and lots and lots of connecting all the dots. Not even most Mormons are that interested or motivated to burn that many brain cells in pure research, and most people in general are just too stupid or lazy to bother at all, even if they pretend to have an earnest desire to know the truth.
It has always been the people motivated by the extreme hate and fear of Mormonism who have written and researched the most about it. Conversely, it has been the self-serving Mormon who has chosen to do the bulk of the counter-research and defense of the religion and its history. Both of these primarily religious extremes more often than not miss the very simple truth of the issue one way or another out of blind ignorance, self-interest, an anal-stage fixation on self-martyrdom, and an inflated sense of “chosenness.” The third group of Mormon researchers, in or out of the church itself, are the so-called “scholars,” who pretend to seek, record, and analyze the “facts.” The caveat there would be that they depend upon “known facts,” and “reliable records.” Re-lie the key word here, because facts are seldom known or knowable, and records are often made and kept and redacted by liars. They lie, and then lie again, or “re-lie.” Most Mormon histories are in that sense, very “re-liable.” Worse yet, is the academic’s standard defense of walking a pretended neutral line down the center of Mormon history, allowing all the factions to be a little bit right or wrong here or there, arguing the overall experience on a case-by-case basis. This is the biggest lie there is.
Given that religion is religion and you and I are not going to agree upon who is serving the devil in the ultimate, cosmic, universal sense, the fact is, from a legal, a civil and Constitutional perspective, Mormons have been basically in the right most of the time. Mormons had a Constitutional, God-given 
natural right to do what they wanted to do, live they way they wanted to live, believe what they wanted to believe, be who they wanted to be. These fundamental rights were infringed upon by an oppressive Christian social and political majority. These forces of the Christian Nation were on the wrong side of the legal, Constitutional, and even Beattitudinal arguments almost one-hundred percent of the time in their oppression of Mormonism from Joseph Smith’s first vision to Mitt Romney’s second run at the White House. In the final telling, it doesn’t matter a rat’s rectum if Joseph Smith was an earnest, but bogus impostor as a prophet or not. He had a right to pretend he talked to God, and anyone who wanted to believe it had a right to follow him, even Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman.
Furthermore, the one single time Mormonism lost a legal, Constitutional challenge was on the issue of plural marriage—a harmless social and religious contract between consenting adults that frankly is none of your bigoted Christian business. It’s certainly none of the government’s business. Anti-bigamy laws are really just anti-Mormon laws, unequally applied only to those who marry and co-habitate with their multiple sex partners, while permitting serial fornicators to continue to enjoy the fruits of marriage without any of the responsibility of marriage. The same Supreme Court that ruled Christians could define Biblically approved marital status for the non-Christian, also upheld the Dred Scott decision and gave us the “Jim Crow” era that justified racial bigotry via a similarly fallacious “separate but equal” rationale. It was a Supreme Court packed with Christian, hillbilly redneck southern justices.
Christianity’s zeal to eliminate the Mormon practice of multiple wifery really had nothing to do with Biblical interpretation or moral claims of Christian “enlightenment.” Christianity didn’t really care about the wives or the offspring of these perfectly happy and functional marriages, because its agents wholeheartedly destroyed 
these unions, imprisoned the family breadwinners and thus impoverished and left destitute their wives and children. Christian “reformers” systematically broke up the very families they pretended to care about. Christianity’s true interest in destroying Mormon plural marriage comes once again down to not allowing Mormons by the recruitment of significant numbers of eligible and fertile females into their communities, to rapidly go about out-producing and out-populating the influx of local Christians. Christianity was once again fighting for control over frontier land the Mormons had now made productive. Once again, gaining that control came down to circumventing the solid Mormon voting block.
And I guess that’s why I’ve assumed the role of abridging the Mormon historical record, gleaning out what I think would be most helpful for all sides of the Mormon question. Because, most anti-Mormon “history” 
is little more than Christian self-interested BS. This has been mindlessly countered by impassioned, “testimony-based” whimpering from Mormon defenders about how innocent and pure Joseph Smith and his band of merry men were, a woeful tale of generational victimhood designed almost exclusively to “convert” you. However, you don’t need to be “converted” to see exactly what was going on between American Christianity and early Mormons. But we don’t have to pick one or the other narrative on blind faith and just ignore contrary evidence we don’t like or doesn’t fit into the scheme we’ve already decided to believe. The truth remains, that every time some neutral investigator went into the Mormon experience, they came out giving Mormonism a fairly clean bill of health—like this little observation from BYU egghead Hugh Nibley, a faddishly popular Mormon apologist throughout the height of the last big anti-Mormon evangelical craze in the 1970’s through the 1980’s:
At the end of the last century, the great tradition of European scholarship in the grand style culminated in the person of Eduard Meyer. … No other man ever combined the learning both of the East and the classical world in a work of such high and lasting authority as Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums - the ultimate and, in fact, the last general history of antiquity to be the work of a single mind.29
This man had a particular interest in ancient religions, and it occurred to him that in Mormonism he might study at first hand how a real religion gets started. So impressed was he by the possibilities of such a study that he packed up and went to Utah in 1904, to devote a year of his priceless time to studying the Mormons.
…
Meyer’s entire Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen is a study in parallels, comparing the new religion with revealed religions of the past.30 While grandly contemptuous of Joseph Smith’s low coefficient of Kultur, the great savant illustrates at length the “exact identity” of his Church both in “atmosphere” and sundry particulars with that of the early Christians. A “striking and irrefutable” parallelism supports Mormon claims to revelation; “with perfect right” they identify themselves with the apostolic church of old. The similarity extends to the faults as well as the virtues of the Prophet and his followers—they may be matched “at every point” by the faults and virtues of the ancient prophets and the ancient church….
What Eduard Meyer sees in the Mormon doctrine is before everything else Konsequenz (consistency; to use his own words, that doctrine is “absolutely literal, sober, and logical”; verstandesgemäss). Moreover, says Meyer, the scientific aspects of the dogma, “in full agreement with the later discoveries of science,” may well be a cause of considerable gratification to believers….145
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/transcripts/?id=47
http://archaeology.about.com/library/glossary/bldef_meyere.htm
Of course, only Mormons seriously study the works of Hugh Nibley, and then only the “scholarly” BYU apologists in the Mormon academic crowd. And I would not expect anyone to take any official LDS apologist, even me, at his word alone. But I have only been trying to say what the bona fide genius, Eduard Meyer said generations ago: Mormons live and preach a consistent and logical set of basic doctrines. (Except when they have shite in their ears and get it all wrong.)
Sorry, that’s just the way it falls historically, by a preponderance of evidence. I know I originally entitled this series, What’s Wrong With Mormonism, but a centrally-governed coven of Satanic murderers, assassins, and New World Order conspirators, simply isn’t one of the things wrong with Mormonism. It never has been. In the words of the legendary frontier journalist, Horace Greely:
“Do I regard the great body of these Mormons,” he asks, “as knaves and hypocrites” Assuredly not. I do not believe there was ever a religion whereof the great mass of the adherents were not honest and sincere. Hypocrites and knaves there are in all sects; it is quite possible that some of the magnates of the Mormon church regard this so-called religion (with all others) as a contrivance for the enslavement and fleecing of the many, and the aggrandizement of the few; but I cannot believe that a sect, so considerable and so vigorous as the Mormons, was ever founded in conscious imposture, or built up on any other basis than that of earnest conviction.”
–Overland Journey, p 223
–Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church, Volume 4, pg 532
I would submit likewise, that Christians live and act upon their central beliefs. In this, they tend to gravitate toward imposing their religious dogma upon any and all within their dominion. This is because, unlike 
Mormonism, or for that matter, the Founding Fathers, who’s central doctrines revolve around the blessings of man’s “Free Agency,” and are anchored to the concept of a Constitutionally protected, pluralistic nation that guarantees religious liberty for all, Christianity to this day is based upon the fundamental belief that all non-Christians are the literal spawn of the devil. Non-Christians are “infidels” or “heathens,” and have no place in a Christian society. In Christian theology, the “unredeemed” constitute only an ongoing threat to a Christian Nation. Unlike Mormonism, Christianity has had a long, storied history of universal, unflinching aggression, oppression, extermination, torture, murder and persecution of its rivals. Christianity had conducted its program of violent dominance of “lesser” religions and peoples, both covertly, and also quite openly and proudly, much of which has been vaingloriously committed to record, proudly, by Christianity’s highest officials and most stalwart leaders.
When I got into the whole Mountain Meadows record, in the course of my explorations, I was quite prepared to concede that Christianity had me and my dumbassed Mormon brethren dead-nailed in this one instance. Unfortunately, even though Mountain Meadows represents just the sort of colossal screw-up Mormonism has always 
been capable of, this turns out to be the case only by accident, out of sheer stupid irony, rather than centralized malice and design.
Sure, some of the anti-Mormon literature can be quite convincing if you simply intended to hate or ridicule Mormons in the first place. But, you don’t have to go to the local Christian fellowship hall and hear some evangelical nutjob dressed in a scary Mormon temple costume or modeling frumpy “magic” Mormon underwear with his worship-team of conspiracy-theory clowns, to feel like you have reliable, non-Mormon sources who can tell us what early Mormonism’s problems really came down to. We don’t have to guess what early Mormons kept doing that was always annoying the Christian population around them. This we can read from sources like Governor Ford’s on-the-spot, direct evaluation of the real problem neighboring Christians had with the Mormon presence in Illinois. Ford is well on the mark, inasmuch as the same primary complaint got the Saints thrown out of Missouri previously:
But the great cause of popular fury was, that the Mormons at several preceding elections had cast their vote as a unit, thereby making the fact apparent that no one could aspire to the honors or offices of the country, within the sphere of their influence, without their approbation and votes. It appears to be one of the principles by which they insist upon being governed as a community, to act as a unit in all matters of government and religion. They express themselves to be fearful that if division should be encouraged in politics, it would soon extend to their religion, and rend their church with schism and into sects.
This seems to me to be an unfortunate view of the subject, and more unfortunate in practice, as I am well satisfied that it must be the fruitful source of excitement, violence, and mobocracy, whilst it is persisted in. It is indeed unfortunate for their peace that they do not divide in elections, according to their individual preferences or political principles, like other people.
http://www.boap.org/LDS/History/History_of_the_Church/Vol_VII
You couldn’t however, do a damned thing about American citizens who didn’t vote the way you wanted them to vote. (Legally that is…) You couldn’t do a damned thing if people wanted to form a club, or a church, or a fraternity, like the Freemasons, or the Elks, or the Boy Scouts, or the John Birch Society—and then sit around, fellowship, share philosophies, and decide to all vote the same way. First in Missouri, and then in Illinois, old Christian settlers, badgered and alarmed by their insistent clergy, goaded by their eager press, went about contriving and building up the public image of an inherent Mormon threat, simply to stifle their vote. Even though there was no evidence of immediate or tangible villainous Mormon action, or any clear indication of a dangerous Mormon movement toward brutal conquest, Christian champions have always had a plethora of distant, anecdotal stories of terror to tell. It was, the anti-Mormonists have always contended, only because the Mormons didn’t quite yet dominate the political scene, it was only because they didn’t have the sheer political force to dominate all of Christendom, that they now pretend for the time being, to be so friendly and harmless. They second they got into power—bam! Then they’d take all the Christians out and reveal their true plans for world domination.
Governor Ford continues his evaluation of the unified Mormon voting block phenomenon:
This one principle and practice of theirs arrayed against them in deadly hostility all aspirants for office who were not sure of their support, all who have been unsuccessful in elections, and all who were too proud to court their influence, with all their friends and connections.
These also were the active men in blowing up the fury of the people, in hopes that a popular movement might be set on foot, which would result in the expulsion or extermination of the Mormon voters. For this purpose public meetings had been called; inflammatory speeches had been made; exaggerated reports had been extensively circulated; committees had been appointed, who rode night and day to spread the reports and solicit the aid of neighboring counties, and at a public meeting at Warsaw, resolutions were passed to expel or exterminate the Mormon population. This was not, however, a movement which was unanimously concurred in. The county contained a goodly number of inhabitants in favor of peace, or who at least desired to be neutral in such a contest. These were stigmatized by the name of “Jack-Mormons,” and there were not a few of the more furious exciters of the people who openly expressed their intention to involve them in the common expulsion or extermination.
A system of excitement and agitation was artfully planned and executed with tact. It consisted in spreading reports and rumors of the most fearful character. As examples: — On the morning before my arrival at Carthage, I was awakened at an early hour by the frightful report, which was asserted with confidence and apparent consternation, that the Mormons had already commenced the work of burning, destruction, and murder, and that every man capable of bearing arms was instantly wanted at Carthage for the protection of the county. We lost no time in starting; but when we arrived at
Carthage we could hear no more concerning this story. Again, during the few days that the militia were encamped at Carthage, frequent applications were made to me to send a force here, and a force there, and a force all about the country, to prevent murders, robberies, and larcenies which, it was said, were threatened by the Mormons. No such forces were sent; nor were any such offenses committed at that time, except the stealing of some provisions, and there was never the least proof that this was done by a Mormon. Again, on my late visit to Hancock county, I was informed by some of their violent enemies that the larcenies of the Mormons had become unusually numerous and insufferable. They admitted that but little had been done in this way in their immediate vicinity. But they insisted that sixteen horses had been stolen by the Mormons in one night near Lima, in the county of Adams. At the close of the expedition, I called at this same town of Lima, and upon inquiry, was told that no horses had been stolen in that neighborhood, but that sixteen horses had been stolen in one night in Hancock county. This last informant being told of the Hancock story, again changed the venue to another distant settlement in the northern edge of Adams.
If you cannot accept any part of this reasoning so far, I am only wasting your time. If you are willing to entertain at least the notion that the Mormons are all deluded fools who often come off like ignorant and egocentric buffoons, and yet are willing to confess that none of this is punishable by law, then perhaps I have made some progress. Mormon delusion is as Constitutionally protected as Christian delusion.
I’m preaching only one very limited sermon here. I am merely asking you to accept, as Thomas Ford, governor of Illinois, the supreme commander of the state that killed Joseph Smith deduced: when it comes down to it, all the titillating claims of Mormon outrages throughout the years, almost invariably turn out to be willow-the-wisps. Rumors. Wild goose chases. When you get there in person to check it out, there almost never appears to be any concrete examples, only anecdotes passed around third hand.
Mormonism, consequently, having not actually exposed any specific legal premise, has been politically, socially, and at times very physically punished by a Christian America based primarily upon what Christianity imagines it would be up to if it were in Mormonism’s place.
Mormonism, I repeat for emphasis, has almost utterly escaped serious self-incrimination from Day-1. There is one resounding exception. That would be the clear-cut assassination of roughly 120 men, women, and older children of the emigrant Fancher Party by a handful of local Mormon leaders and their minions at Mountain Meadows in 1857. And that is one whopping exception. What these particular Mormons did to their ostensibly “Christian” foes is fairly obvious. And hideous. The question of “why” these particular Mormons shot down this particular group of “Christians” isn’t so easy to pin down however. But I will warn you that if you continue honestly digging into the matter, if the one person you want to hang the crime on is Brigham Young or anyone in the official Mormon hierarchy, again, all you come up with is a lot of dangerous rhetoric, murky anecdotal assumptions, and mostly a lot of bold assertion.
Likewise, if you want to put Mountain Meadows down to its perpetrators following some clear mandate out of general LDS doctrine or arising out of a simple extrapolation of central Mormon theology, you will again be unrewarded. The Christian nemeses of Mormonism have tried earnestly to obfuscate the chronology of the events leading up to Mountain Meadows, but the simple fact remains that Christian America had already decided to exterminate Mormonism months before the Fancher Party got anywhere near Utah Territory. Mountain Meadows is not the “reason” James Buchannan sent an army to kill off the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The tragedy at Mountain Meadows was the direct result of America’s determination to destroy Mormonism, not vice-versa. Had a pack of Christian reformers, disgruntled federal appointees and contract-holders, not gone tattling back to Washington with the usual litany of grossly exaggerated tales of Mormon “outrages,” deliberately trying to provoke a federal assault upon the Mormon capital, there would have been no US invasion of Utah Territory. If there had been no invasion, the Mormon officials in southern Utah would have had no cause to hold up the Fancher’s wagon train, no cause to withhold basic provisions from them, and the Fancher Party would have passed, with only some slight complaining on both sides, peaceably through Utah without incident.
And it pains me to say this, but it must be pointed out. The bastard Mormons who wiped out the Fancher company and friends, learned how it was done from the Fancher’s idiot, hillbilly, redneck, hick cousins back in Missouri and Illinois. They didn’t do anything to the “good Christian” Fancher and Baker families that the “good Christian” kin of the Fanchers and Bakers, and certainly the Missouri Wildcats amongst them, hadn’t already done to the Mormons, en-masse, repeatedly, and in spades.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre on a personal level is a great miscarriage of justice and human tragedy. In the great, “Christian America” scheme of things, however, it is a small blip on the anti-Mormon political agenda. In an of itself, it was officially, on both sides, dismissed as collateral damage, an unintended consequence of a short war that was pointless to begin with and concluded peacefully in the end. Today, Mountain Meadows would be little more than a historical afterthought, were it not for the unshakeable true-believers, the serious anti-Mormonists, who still pull it out of their sleeves like a trump card, to add just that little bit of credibility to the contention that subsequent legal sanctions levied against the Mormon religion, were fair and rational. Even sensible and unavoidable.
With the utmost respect, it has to be understood that the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre have been made into poster children for THE BIG LIE. Their memory is desecrated every time some evangelical clown uses them to “prove” Brigham Young was a devil worshipper and the Mormons are all clandestine killers. The “good Christians” who continually exploit the deaths of these unfortunate souls to sell their books and trinkets and scary lecture tours full of horror stories of Brigham Young’s deluded slaves and “Danite” henchmen, rather than honor their memory, probably only leaves the Fancher Party blushing and apologetic in the hereafter.
If you can’t get over that, then, as I say, I am wasting your time. Mormonism has lots of problems. Again, secret death squads isn’t one of them.
Mormon Doctrine Part 3: Infallibility
Mormonism as taught through the revelations of Joseph Smith answers most of the really hard questions dubious Christians have historically had about mankind’s basic relationship to God. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first “Christian” to be skeptical about Plato’s “Perfect Being” theories. Joseph Smith “revealed” if you will, that God and his Son are two separate Deities, their third companion is a Spirit, we’re all part of the same family, spiritual and physical sons and daughters of God. The Father and Son are “Perfected” humans, and we can be “Perfected” under their mentoring as well. We’re here to learn and grow and be more like our Father in Heaven, and so forth. These lost “plain and precious” truths are the sort of thing Joseph Smith was on about when we spoke of the “fullness” of the gospel. Not even Joseph Smith however, and his direct dictation from Deity actually restored all knowledge about everything God has in store for every facet and condition of mankind.
The embarrassing fact for those Mormons harping on the notion that the LDS “Prophets” of modern times make the church inherently superior, is that even by Mormon standards, Jesus has actually not maintained an ongoing stream of “new” revelation. He ultimately hasn’t revealed a whole lot more to modern Mormon prophets than he did to his contemporary ancient apostles, no matter how much today’s Mormon leadership imagines to the contrary. And, of what He has or could reveal to modern man, even Mormon leadership accepts that rather a lot of possible oncoming “revelation,” is still not meant to be openly broadcast anyway. Joseph Smith really only spoke of restoring those few but vital, key bits of Divine knowledge that had been lost, bent, or eroded through generations of the Church trying to fill in the blanks with Platonism and human “logic.” During Smith’s era of restoration, naturally, the volume of “new” or actually “restored” information came in a flood. Then it was all written down more or less, and the flood trickled off to just an occasional drip, after Joseph Smith. Because Joseph Smith had done his job. Which was restoring the church and those missing bits of data needed to run it properly.
Daily communication with God has never been the normal state of human condition. It has not so been since man was cast out of the Garden of Eden. It is not part of the deal, even for Mormons, even for Mormon “Prophets.”
For example, Moses came out of nowhere historically speaking, became a major prophet, wrote half the Old Testament, worked plagues and miracles, talked to God regularly, wandered around for 40 years in the desert, led his people to the Promised Land, and then, as my Norse ancestors would say, at this point Moses leaves the saga. He just disappears. From that day to this, thousands upon thousands of years, there have been only a handful of “prophets” who rose to anything like the stature of Moses. Each prophet before and after Moses likewise rose to the specific Biblically recorded task God had set for him, jotted down any specific task-related instructions which got added to the canon, and when the job was done they died, sealed their testimony with blood, or otherwise were never heard of again. We do not, just to make the point clear, ever read in the Biblical records of a string of functionary, custodial “Prophet” replacements who after the big prophet was gone and the main job was over, hung around and kept busy administering the program in an organized church structure. There are no biblical records where Aaron takes over for Moses, and then writes down a completely different spin on the “golden calf” episode from his own perspective. You don’t read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and get to sort through each writer’s opinions of what the other three had to say about this subject or that. Yes, that all came later in the greater Christian Church, but it came from Church Fathers and Apologists and Clergy, none of whom claimed to be a “living prophet.” Granted, they acted as if they were and considered themselves infallible anyway.
If we take the existing Christian canon as the Word of God in any case, we can only assume that with a few exceptions, we’re still reading what Moses or Daniel or Ezekiel or Jeremiah wrote thousands of years ago because there wasn’t much God needed to add to it till the next job came up hundreds or thousands of years later and a new prophet needed calling. And in the Biblical record, it seems clear that each succeeding “Prophet” was only concerned with what he was doing for God and His people at the time, not harmonizing a whole prophetic tradition, or bringing everyone up to current status in the dogma department.
Now, it can be argued that preparing for the arrival of Jesus Christ was the whole point of the Old Testament prophets, and He did in fact harmonize the canon to that point by showing up personally and telling us all how the story ended. You could easily assume that His arguments and commentaries that became the New Testament do indeed take Christianity up to the current status. To accept that view however, you’d have to believe that Jesus was a very poor writer and had no sense of organization at all. He never wrote anything down for one thing. All his apostles got tortured and murdered to death in less than a lifetime, and his organization has been terrorizing itself ever since.
In Mormonism’s “most correct of any book on earth,” the Book of Mormon, you have exactly the history of prophet-to-prophet hand-offs combined with prophetic condensation, abridgement, clarification and preservation you’d expect in a real God-Guided system. Those prophets got wiped out as well, but they were more devout scribblers than their Old World equivalents obviously. But the Book of Mormon, all boasts aside, frankly doesn’t add much to the Biblical canon in terms of new and revelatory doctrinal points. Most of the Book of Mormon’s value lies in it’s existence. It’s a conceptual proof that God has other sheep, that God speaks to other prophets, that a modern prophet revealed and translated it, that the canon is still open. What’s recorded in the Book of Mormon could never be more revolutionary or revelatory than that it exists at all.
The problem we have with Mormonism in the area of ongoing prophecy, is that starting with Joseph Smith, you do now in fact have a highly structured bureaucracy leading a permanently constituted organizational “Church” structure. Its president takes upon himself the title of “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” and then uncomfortably waits for the next church-related job God feels a need to personally take an interest in. It’s like the Book of Mormon system only it happens in real-time. You end up with caretakers making perfunctory notes for posterity just to say they did something, as did Omni and Jarom and Enos, just handing down the book generation after generation, sometimes adding a note about how nothing much was happening so they’re just passing down the records like they were told to do. This, honestly speaking, is exactly what the “Restored” Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints) has become since the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. This is not necessarily a reflection upon LDS leadership. Joseph Smith was shot all to hell by Christian mobs to shut him up and kill the movement, and perhaps that was part of God’s plan, but it is mostly a good indication that God generally calls any given “major” prophet to do a specific job and then whatever happens to him afterward just happens, because the job is done. In Smith’s case the claimed job was “Restoration,” and having “Restored” the structure and key doctrines necessary, we can assume that not only was Joseph Smith done with the assignment, but God was fairly happy with the wisdom and knowledge He’d revealed in the process, and therefore Smith’s successors could expect not a whole lot of additional conversation with Deity until conditions according to God’s timetable and desires warranted it.
Then again, the whole point of being a mortal—something God has amply revealed to both ancient and modern prophets—is for us to work out our own Salvation by making our own choices. The whole point of mortality is lost if God instructs mankind point-by-point and item-by-item what to do, what to think, and how to live all day every day. Mormon canon teaches of obedience, but the principle of obedience is a choice based upon faith, not an absolutely guaranteed, Divinely decreed and spelled-out formula to follow because it’s proven to “earn” you a certain reward based upon performance.
What Joseph Smith actually restored was the “Church,” a system of mortal government, through which God
allows man to regulate man’s own participation in God’s Kingdom. God doesn’t need the Church. Man needs the Church. The Church is a mortal institution run by and for mortals. The difference between Mormonism and any other “Christian” church, is authority. Mormonism, if you care to buy it, claims to have direct authority from Jesus Christ to administer to His believers in His name. That’s authority mind you. Along with authority comes power and inspiration, and there’s where it gets a bit sticky. The Mormon hierarchy holds the “keys,” which means the token authority to talk directly to God, to commune with angels, the Holy Spirit, or see visions, heal the sick, raise the dead, any of all that miraculous stuff. I fully believe that the current LDS president for example, could talk to Jesus personally. I take that on faith. But I don’t have to believe that he doesn’t do that however, because he has said he doesn’t. I therefore know he doesn’t talk to God and Angels. That is not faith based. So what I know for a fact is, that Jesus doesn’t sit in the Salt Lake Temple and directly administer HIs church. And more to the point, Jesus isn’t up in the Church Office Building passing on daily lessons to the Brethren about bigger and bigger doctrinal concepts just for entertainment purposes.
http://www.ldschurchnews.com/media/attachments/53.pdf
The Church is about salvation. It’s about serving Christ and feeding His sheep. You just don’t need to know that much to accomplish this mission. Jesus doesn’t need to come down and micromanage the operation. And sure, by the time you read this some LDS “Prophet” may say he’s had a face-to-face with Jesus, and I’ll gladly accept this as the truth if and when it happens. It simply hasn’t happened since Joseph Smith to date.
Mormon priesthood authority is an exercise in on-the-job self-training. The various LDS authorities over time, have always been rather diverse in the way they trained themselves, and the way they defined their system of government. Originally, whatever Joseph Smith said about anything was “doctrine.” That was pretty much the whole early LDS organizational structure. What is or isn’t “LDS “doctrine” since then has always been inherently uncertain apart from somebody openly claiming a “revelation” and then having it unanimously sustained by the three ruling Mormon priesthood bodies, the Quorum of the Seventy, the Council of Twelve, and the First Presidency. Short of the completion of this canonization process, there have always existed “gospel hobbies” that general authorities, BYU religion professors, and even the general membership have been allowed to play with. These “mysteries” are pondered through generations and infiltrate many levels of official and semi-official LDS “theology,” but have no basis in revelation or authority and thus are not “doctrine.” This remains true, even though the likes of Bruce R McConkie might have sternly and apparently “authoritatively” argued his own unique brilliance here there and everywhere for however many years.
And down a hundred rungs of the LDS doctrinal evolutionary ladder from bona-fide, half-credentialed
doctrinal pretenders like Bruce R McConkie, hangs the likes of one W Cleon Skousen–by his prehensile tail probably. Skousen made his fame first by becoming a “Commie Hunter,” and gaining a hysterical popularity in the dry little Salt Lake Valley back in the McCarthy era, and this he used as a platform for promoting his bogus doctrinal babblings as well, assisted again by virtue of his lame BYU half-title and his chumminess with a couple of key church presidents. But even his most staunch and authoritative supporters in the First Presidency ultimately turned their backs on Skousen. And yet, Skousen remains protected even today from those who would sully his legacy. Even when McConkie gave his lecture on modern heresy at BYU in 1980, Skousen and I were both in attendance. I always wondered why Brother Bruce didn’t just name Cleon as a “Modern Heretic” from the lectern and be done with it. Professor Eugene England unfortunately didn’t have Skousen’s connections, so it was England who got the infamous dressing-down letter from McConkie instead.
Let’s not pretend there aren’t any “politics” in the church.
http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6770
http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england
If you believe that the LDS “Prophet” talks directly to God, if you believe that’s the whole point of the church, and that the entire LDS governmental system was established by Joseph Smith merely so it could rubber-stamp its approval of anything the “Prophet” comes up with, I submit that you are a fool. And Bruce R McConkie agrees with me apparently. Actually, McConkie would call you a damned fool.
If you think any half-arsed theory belched out in a stake fireside by any given LDS “prophet,” in the last two centuries or so is living scripture, or that any jackass book written by some LDS prophet’s best buddy, or some little tome once given some offhand praise by The Brethren, singularly, or en-masse, rates as “Mormon doctrine,” you’re basically a heretic. This sort or confusion and anarchy is not the church Joseph Smith established, and definitely not the church God had in mind when He “revealed” a three-bodied regulatory structure set up as a check-and-balance system in the very image of the US Constitution–which again, Joseph Smith maintained was inspired by God to establish God’s purposes and Kingdom on Earth.
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Do_Mormons_Believe_in_Blind_Obedience.html
In the organization of a new stake recently, a general authority rolled into town to conduct the various meetings and sustain new stake authorities. This authority came to the business of installing the new stake president and put him before the body to be sustained. “Those who can sustain (so-and-so) in this calling, please manifest by the uplifted hand…. And then he said, “Those opposed…as if it would make any difference….” concluding with a drifting-off tone, a wink, and a responsive chuckle from the crowd.
Plainly, this general authority was under the impression that the rubber-stamping process should be enforced all the way down to you and me out there in the pews on Sunday. If I had raised my hand and objected to the sustaining of a man who’d been molesting my toddlers, would that make a difference do you suppose? What if he were looking to sustain a vote on something really really controversial, something that changed doctrine and the church itself? How about plural marriage for instance?
Official Declaration—1
To Whom It May Concern:
…Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.
There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.
Wilford Woodruff
President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6, 1890.
Now, you might expect me to use plural marriage as an example of prophetic waffling or doctrinal unclarity. Nothing could be more untrue. The above declaration simply falls back to previous, superseding doctrines about honoring, sustaining and obeying the law, long found directly from Joseph Smith and published in the Wentworth Letter, now called the Articles of Faith.
12 We believe in being asubject to bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the dlaw.
The truth is, laws were passed that were specifically designed to kill Mormonism. These authorized civil authority to confiscate the entire bank account of the LDS church and every stick of property it owned for teaching that plural marriage was a correct Biblical principle. The accusation president Woodruff was fending off was that Mormons may 
have stopped teaching plural marriage as a proper Biblical marital status, but everyone knew the church still believed it and so all of Mormonism was still guilty. In the end, Mormonism’s Christian persecutors made a lot of headway into making that “thought-crime” stick anyway, Constitutional or not. However, as long as plural marriage was neither taught nor authorized by the LDS church, the church was legally off the hook. So, the above “Manifesto” was published and the policy was sustained as canon doctrine and thereby Mormons were officially out of the multiple wife business. In reality, all it really does is re-assert the LDS respect and deference for the Constitution of the United States of America, which on this uniquely Mormon marital issue, had been manipulated by a lot of activist Christian judges and attorneys who’s real interest was destroying the church, not regulating marriage.
What I’m most fascinated by however, is this rather casual aside to the whole controversy:
The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty. (Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff Regarding the Manifesto: Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.)
The emphasis is mine above. This is the most self-serving, logically circular, and mindlessly, NAZI-propaganda-like verse in all of the LDS scriptures. This is papal infallibility added to the king’s divine right to
rule added to the deity of pharaoh as implemented today. In reality, it’s merely a quick aside by way of introducing the gravity of Woodruff’s announcement about abandoning plural marriage. He’s merely reassuring that he’s not a fallen prophet for retreating from the practice. This little reassurance however, is now a bigger statement of “Mormon doctrine” than the plural marriage Manifesto it prefaces. It is used by any general authority in the church, and particularly the president, to halt any debate on any subject he’s decided to booster. The literal belief of those promoting it, is that since the guy they’re backing is still moving their lips and words are coming out, it must be God’s direct will, because if it wasn’t, God would have struck them dead on the spot before He’d allow any of them to babble out anything goofy or misleading.
Anyone who’s read half of what Brigham Young babbled about knows this surely cannot be true. Ask Bruce McConkie. For some reason Bruce and I have become rather sympatico in my old age on this score. But on the other hand, Brigham Young also said this:
“The greatest fear I have is that the people of this Church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord.” 21
http://www.staylds.com/docs/WhatIsOfficialMormonDoctrine.html
President Woodruff had no intention of making a claim of LDS infallibility where the president of the church is concerned when he assured his audience that the Lord would not let the LDS leadership lead its flock astray. That wasn’t even his point. All he was trying to do was brace them for a major reversal in what had become a major doctrine of salvation for the Saints in Utah.
But isn’t there indeed a system set up that would in fact check any church president before he went very far astray? Isn’t that called “church government?” Isn’t that called being governed “by common consent,” rather than being obligatorily extorted by the powerful to rubber-stamp their decrees? Or Is God’s whole plan to guard His people from human error, ignorance and prejudice, just to shoot a lightning bolt through the prophet if he misspeaks?
And isn’t it through church government, not a direct call from God, that the church president gets to be church president in the first place? It’s all done by seniority of call, not a voting process. Originally succession went to the oldest apostle, later changed to the senior apostle by time of service in the calling. Automatic succession by seniority eliminates a lot of politics, but has its disadvantages as well and tends to create a geriarchy led by the least current old codger who’s the least connected with what’s going on now in the world. And it leaves lingering, fluttering death-strings of those who have strong doctrinal views on one side of an argument, who die after a few years or even months of harping on it as a new president, only to be replaced by another octogenarian on his death bed who has an entirely opposite viewpoint. But you see, I’m wrong for even seeing what is patently obvious and saying a word about it to anyone according to Dallin Oaks or Bruce R McConkie. The proper duty of the rank-and-file Mormon is to quietly pray your heart out hoping God will eventually take care of it directly or the Brethren with eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses.
I could be even wronger by pointing out that Acts 1:15-26 clearly explains how the original apostles, let by Peter, selected a member of their body, and that it involved a pre-selection and the casting of lots—nothing like the procedure used in Mormonism today. And Brigham Young governed without a presidency for many years before he dared call himself “president” of the church and take Joseph Smith’s place directly—for fear of congregational dissent. So Mormon claims of having the same organization as the “primitive” Church is a little grandiose. To make the point clearer, Jesus personally appeared and called his apostles. What happens now doesn’t even involve casting lots to introduce a Divinely random input to the selection. For generations Utahns were calling Utahns from around the Valley and the system just shuffled them down the seniority line and that’s how we got who we got in there now, period. In order to sell the notion that Jesus personally called today’s “Prophet,” you have to assume Jesus “prompted” his name to stand out on a list of local candidates on some ward roster forty or fifty years ago, and through Divine Providence, rising here and there to this and that call, the fact that he ended up at the top of the hierarchy was subtly guided all that time through all those processes, and most of all you have to believe that God predestined him to be born along the Wasatch Front to just the right Mormon family. All of this bolsters the contention that the closed and ignorant society of Utah is Zion and God’s repository of all wisdom and spirituality. Why else would all the “Prophets” come from Utah? Well, because the selection process has essentially excluded anyone out of earshot of the Salt Lake temple from even getting on a list. The concept of God appearing at the deathbed of the outgoing “Prophet” and speaking the name and GPS coordinates of His Chosen successor isn’t in the system.
Which leads me to a load of constantly changing doctrines and policies, or even canon verse, like the repeated changing of temple ceremonial texts which are the highest of the LDS canon, the rules for conducting the quorums of the LDS leadership, even the questions on the temple recommend list and how they got there, that just somehow, somewhere get “decided” and continue forever until one day they change it all, and basically you’re just supposed to deem it none of your business. Annoying, yes, goes directly to the topic of Mormon doctrine, but for me and most other Mormons, not terribly troubling because these are doctrinal components not meant for public consumption anyway.
What is however openly troubling for many Latter-day Saints is the Mormon “no contention” doctrine. This very popular dogma has been magnifying itself for generations and is now cited any time you disagree with anyone of any authority in the church. The first person to stop the argument and say in the sweetest primary voice, “I feel the spirit of contention,” wins their point, and disrespects the other party into silence. This phenomenon arises out one silly verse in 3d Nephi that Mormonism has taken to the hysterically extreme:
29 For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit ofacontention is not of me, but is of the bdevil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.
Dallin Oaks is famous for his role in very publicly taking this blind obedience principle to new heights in the first major network television documentary about the modern LDS church under president Gordon B Hinckley. In this video Oaks gives a little lecture against criticizing LDS church leadership, in which he says without a trace of sarcasm or so much as a wink to the irony of it:
It’s wrong to criticise leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcwghb_don-t-ever-criticize-us-even-if-th_new’
Oak’s suggestion arises from the very real LDS expectation that as its leadership is speaking away incorrectly, or heading the church down the wrong path, God will send an angel to “reveal” their error, or that God will actually strike the offen
ding idiot dead before any damage can be done. Therefore, no rank-and-file Mormon need ever speak out. Just patiently wait for the “Brethren” to either correct themselves or be corrected by Deity. Have faith and wait–however long it takes for them to realize what is blatantly obvious to you and the world. And again, this inane contention arises from Wilford Woodruff’s urgent appeal to his flock to not fire him or leave the church in mass exodus because he was putting the kibosh on plural marriage.
The dilemma I have here is that the claims of Mormon leadership’s infallibility, combined with the congregation’s duty to ignore their error even when they are obviously being fallible, is clearly Mormon doctrine. There are verses in canon scripture. Everyone believes it literally. These notions are standard citations by leadership to prove that leadership is never wrong. And yes, numerous other scriptures refute the notion of LDS leadership infallibility, but are not nearly as faith-instilling and spiritually sexy. To a church leader, statements from scripture that suggest infallibility are like spiritual crack. It’s a shortcut to a spiritual high, or at least obedience. Scripture that concedes LDS leadership to be mere mortals and thus fallible, are only cited on rare occasions to explain away doctrinal paradoxes and changes over the years.
Papal infallibility is a cheap and easy doctrinal win. It sticks to any argument you want to win as a massive force-multiplier, even if you only have a shred of implied authority behind you. It is obviously not likely to be abandoned by anyone in authority. The only way to combat contemporary human authority, is to fire back a contradictory verse of canon. So just like any Biblical scripture, just like any other religious denomination, Mormons a lot of the time just end up bashing even the modern canon verses back and forth, proving to themselves whatever they want to believe anyway. And in perfect circular argument, Papal infallibility allows you to dismiss any canonical argument against you by contending that the Pope is not only infallible, but the only mortal authority capable of properly defining not just doctrine, but the Divine canon itself, and by extension how canon is to be applied and interpreted.
Joseph Smith almost daily, hammered straight and true at specific questions and nailed the answers to the canon wall. What virtually every Mormon “prophet” since Smith has done instead, is occasionally extrapolate from either Smith’s revelations and statements of faith, or tangential statements by Smith other prophets. For example, President Woodruff clearly didn’t mean his little preface to become what it has now become. He had intended a simple reassurance that in the specific case of his cessation of plural marriage, that he had seen a revelation outlining its necessity. He makes this abundantly clear. He makes it abundantly clear that all he is promising is that in the matter at hand, he is not a fallen prophet. Likewise, Nephi’s warning against contention never intended to stifle earnest and enthusiastic debate.
http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/tagm30.html
Apparently modern Mormon leaders find attempting to nail down Mormon doctrine point-by-point in specific terms so trepedatious that they don’t actually do it unless, and until literally slapped repeatedly about the head and chest with it. When it won’t go away, when it will result in death and destruction and the end of the church, when riots might ensue at any moment, when the entire progress of the Kingdom of God on Earth is at stake, only then will they actually sit down and deal with the given issue—and then only that issue. I could suppose that this seems to be because they are skittish of late about pulling a meeting on some critical doctrinal crises because it implies, nay almost demands that somebody in charge of the meeting pony-up a revelation, or they all look impotent, ineffectual, and a bit silly arguing amongst themselves just like commoners.
In the case of plural marriage, Joseph Smith received a revelation sustaining the practice of plural marriage as observed by ancient prophets. (Section 132 D&C.) The modern Saints began to practice it. That led to serious social and political problems that would have destroyed the church. Wilford Woodruff went to the Lord, then the body of the church, laid out all the doctrinal considerations, asserted that God had told him to issue a 
decree that the practice should be stopped, and made a completely consistent and rational account of both himself and God’s will in the matter.
http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132.34-40,45?lang=eng#33
No complaints have I then, with Wilford Woodruff or the whole plural marriage issue. The system worked. That’s actually how serious LDS doctrinal points should be dealt with. But you must also see, that in the course of solving one doctrinal dilemma, Wilford Woodruff’s allusion to LDS presidential infallibility just created another huge doctrinal controversy. As a practical policy, all LDS general authorities are now treated by themselves and their membership as if they were infallible. If not infallible perhaps, then certainly unquestionable. In effect, infallible by other means.
As it happens, the local priesthood lesson this coming week is a little tome by Ezra Taft Benson, out of the June 1980 Liahona, titled, Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet. It’s a classic, self-serving primer in LDS hierarchal terrorism:
1. The prophet is the only man who speaks for the Lord in everything.
2. The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works.
3. The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet.
4. The prophet will never lead the church astray.
5. The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time.
6. The prophet does not have to say “Thus Saith the Lord,” to give us scripture.
7. The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.
8. The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning.
9. The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual.
10. The prophet may advise on civic matters.
11. The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich.
12. The prophet will not necessarily be popular with the world or the worldly.
13. The prophet and his counselors make up the First Presidency—the highest quorum in the Church.
14. The prophet and the presidency—the living prophet and the First Presidency—follow them and be blessed—reject them and suffer.
It would take gigabytes to tear into the fascinatingly backwards little sermons that Benson delivers to explain each of these points, but for present purposes I will simply remark that this lesson appeared thirty-one years ago as of this writing as a First Presidency message and it preceded Bruce McConkie’s famous rebuke of Eugene England, in which McConkie vehemently contradicts most of Benson’s points above. McConkie could not have been unaware of it and perhaps it’s a bit of a play from the top to slap down both sides of the then raging battle over just who decided what Mormon doctrine was. This war was fought on the one side by BYU religion professors and other civilian dabblers like Skousen, and on the other hand, was waged on the offensive by a somewhat two-fronted attack first from Bruce R McConkie, who used the opportunity to declare himself the prime arbiter of all things doctrinal, and finally, not entirely in lockstep with McConkie, a late-entering bombing run of official declarations from “The Brethren” trying to own the debate and keep McConkie in his place. By Benson’s criteria this list of “truths” is “modern scripture” and “more vital to us than the standard works,” and essentially superior to Mormon canon. Benson had the credentials and wrote as President of the Quorum of Twelve, on assignment of the First Presidency, delivered it in official LDS forum, and published it in official LDS magazines. Either Benson and his Quorum of Twelve and First Presidency are preaching false doctrine here, and leading the whole church astray, or Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.
Another way to phrase this convoluted argument is to say that Mormons in the little Utah Valley after many generations of isolation had finally got smart. They made a university. Then they found out that if you get smart and encourage study and analysis and free-thinking, you end up with a lot of Mormons with high degrees asking questions that “The Brethren” can’t answer or can’t answer without calling their predecessors ignorant and uninspired at least by implication. You are now stuck, because the “Glory of God is Intelligence,” but intelligent Mormons spot problems and inconsistencies and outright incorrectness. They find these things in Mormon leadership, their writings, and their theories, past and present. McConkie’s solution was to claim it’s all about the canon. The ultimate standard of correct Mormon doctrine is tested with the canon, and no matter who said it at what level of authority in the LDS church, if it disagrees with the canon, the error is with the man and the doctrine, never the canon. The Brethren responded by boasting that God has thus far only called the divinely inspired ignorant and unpopular to serve as prophets, went on to categorize the intelligent and educated as inherently rebellious and ripe for hell, and threw in the rich just to cover all bases since the rich tend to be better educated anyway. And most importantly, The Brethren also pointed out to lesser authorities like Bruce McConkie that it is the First Presidency and only the First Presidency that has anything to say about anything doctrinal.
This of course, did little to shut Bruce McConkie up, or dissuade his by then massive fan base amongst the LDS general membership, or even give them cause for tempering their absolutely desperate loyalty to his officially condemned encyclopedia of Mormon Doctrine.
Officially, Bruce McConkie’s warning to Eugene England that canon scripture, including modern canon revelations, are the foundation of Mormon “Gospel,” is false.
According to Benson’s sermon delivered at England’s very place of employment, BYU, only months previous to England’s berating by McConkie, canon scripture is not in point of fact the measuring stick by which we establish the truth of Mormon doctrine. Not according to the “Prophet.” Officially, the “Prophet” says that Mormon doctrine is whatever the present “Prophet” says it is. And it doesn’t have to be a “revelation” and it doesn’t have to be informed, educated, or inspired. It could be on any subject including civic or political matters. Officially, the “Prophet’s” every random opinion is “more vital” than canon scripture. That’s not me being sarcastic. That’s exactly the way it is repeatedly spelled out in official teaching materials. That is the way it is universally understood in the church.
Officially, when a new “Prophet” assumes the title of LDS President, Mormon doctrine becomes whatever he changes it to. A living “Prophet” trumps the entire history of dead prophets and everything they passed on, including thousands of years of canon scripture.
That’s what the “Prophet” teaches.
But then, what would you expect the “Prophet’s” take on the issue to be? Would you expect him to say, don’t listen to me all that closely—I’m just wingin’ it like you with the scriptures and doin’ my best to make sense of it all…? Of course the prophet’s going to tell you to follow himself. Of course he’s going to promise you the Lord would never let him fail you.
I’d love to be able to explain this in a more credible, sensible, even logical fashion, particularly for the sake of some wavering Saint or LDS investigator who finds this irrational line of dogma intellectually retarded and spiritually troubling. This is all the better I can do.
LDS prophets and leaders are by their own definition, infallibly fallible. The effective doctrine on LDS leadership fallibility is that they are indeed fallible, but you’re not allowed to call them on it.
Glenn Beck Part 4: My Favorite Klingon
By 1963 there wasn’t a mainstream corporate sponsor or conservative organization that would have anything to do with Willard Cleon Skousen. The American Security Council kicked his arse out saying he’d gone off the deep end. William C. Mott, judge advocate general of the US Navy and ASC member said Skousen was “money mad…totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen
That year, Robert Welch, John Birch Society founder, claimed that president Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and Skousen jumped on it with both feet. Skousen’s clients threw him to the curb. The National Association of Manufacturers, formely gracious anti-Communist sponsors of Skousen’s speaking tours, released an official condemnation of both Skousen and the John Birch Society, expressing its intent to disassociate itself from any individual or party who subscribed to their views. Skousen just wrapped his critics into the conspiracy and authored a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”
Except for every High Priest Group in Mormondom, Klingon Skousen laid low for a lot of the ’60s. When he resurfaced at the end of the decade he was promulgating a new family of conspiracies that bundled all the world’s problems into the doings of the capitalist “dynastic rich,” as he called them. Specifically, Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. These culprits Skousen now claimed, were using communist and leftist agents like Ho Chi Minh and the American civil rights movement to accomplish their evil goals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related
In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).
Skousen claimed in The Naked Communist that Commies were out to take over the world because they were evil dominators of the human soul.
In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
…Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium.
Skousen warns readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:
. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:
“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”
(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)
Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:
“Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.
“Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”
The Naked Capitalist on the other hand, now claimed that Communists were only puppets of the dynastic rich. The Council of Foreign Relations and other Liberal internationalist groups were really the minions of these ultra-rich, who wanted to manipulate world events and nations into a single One World Government, or a New World Order.
Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
…”The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
At this point Skousen became the Godfather of countless offshoots and Skousen cells in every conspiratorially oriented organization on the face of the planet. He boasted before he was done, of authoring 44 books and pamphlets, but in my father’s words, he actually just wrote the same book 44 times. His diatribes, particularly corrupted every priesthood quorum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You could also say he infiltrated the Boy Scouts as well, because in the LDS church they are one and the same. The LDS church is the single largest affiliate of Scouting USA. Entering the 1970’s Skousen led the charge against the American Civil Rights Movement. ET Benson’s grandson Steve writes:
Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.” The article asserted that:
” . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”
Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”
He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”
Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:
” . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.”
In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:
“. . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . . Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .” [1976]
Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”
Skousen further declared:“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”
He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.” [1987]
[Skousen had also previously claimed that the US would fall to Communism by 1973.]
In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:
“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.
(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431
Unable to content himself with any single paranoid theory, Skousen moved from frantic brainfart of idiocy to frantic brainfart of idiocy, as one world-ending conspiracy and one set of heinous traitors after another failed to bring America down into Satanic bondage. In 1971, Skousen founded The Freeman Institute, which claimed it intended to provide BYU students a place to read both sides of any political issue from original sources. The truth is, it got weirder and weirder until was thrown off campus In 1982. It was probably no coincidence that church president Spencer W Kimball was announcing the construction of a temple behind the Iron Curtain in Freiberg Germany, and BYU president Dallin Oaks was battling with world academia to maintain the university’s scholarly credibility in light of Skousen’s wild-arsed political and “historical” hackings, and the spawn of similarly eccentric BYU “scholars” like Hugh Nibley and others, who were inventing the pretend science of “Book of Mormon Archeology,” linking Joseph Smith to ancient Egyptian texts, and delving into Masonic, folk-magic and mystical connections to all of the above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Nibley
By 1983, Skousen’s Freeman Institute had re-branded itself the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), and headquartered itself in a survivalist compound in Malta, Idaho. Most importantly, it would be dead as a doornail right now if not for Glenn frigging Beck…
In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with theConstitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[19][20] Skousen’s proposals with the group included a plan to convert the Social Security system to private retirement accounts, as well as a plan that he claimed would completely wipe out the national debt.
Although Skousen was not a tax protester, he did campaign for several proposals to eliminate the federal income tax. One proposal, the Liberty Amendment, precluded the federal government from involvement in any activities that competed with private enterprise and returned federally-owned land to the states.
In 1987, controversy erupted in California when the state briefly considered using Skousen’s book, The Making of America, as a textbook for California schools. Statements in the book regarding slavery, and its use of the term “pickaninny” as a label for slave children engendered a heated debate as to whether the book was appropriate.
…In one instance, the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”[18]
Now, some of Skousen’s political proposals admittedly sound fine to me. His history however, is rubbish. His obsession with finding a Commie or “Insider” under every bed is embarassingly naïve. In fairness, scholars would likely say the same thing about my scribblings. But I don’t care what “scholars” think any more than Cleon Skousen did, so here’s my main point for you Glenn Beck: Skousen’s fairly rapid demise had been set in motion in his affiliation particularly with Tim LaHaye and their Born Again, evangelical dynasty. What had begun to happen was a homogenization of Mormon loony conspiracy freaks with more mainstream Christian Republican Conservative political organizations. That’s a lot like your ministry Glenn. And by no accident I’m sure, as a Skousen acolyte. The Christian Right however, is Christian. Even if they liked Skousen’s patriotic, conspiratorial lippping-off to the Powers-That-Be, Klingon Skousen and his Mormon zealots already figured into the very center of most of the era’s expanding Apocalyptic Christian conspiracy theories. The more Mormon folklore Skousen worked into the conversations in his primarily Christian Conservative think-tanks, the more his Christian “friends” began to think that they didn’t want Mormons coming to the rescue of the Constitution.
There is no “Nephite Cycle” in the Bible. There is no “White Horse Prophecy” in Christendom. Skousen was just too weird, too insanely desperate to save America, too embarrassingly obvious in his belief that Mormons were Christians, too clearly earnest in his professions that Mormons are going to save the world for Christ, and that Mormonism would be the Constitutional Army of Liberation in America, not the Christian Right.
The bottom line is, Christians have no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. The Constitution is an enlightened document. It arose out of Deism, Masonry, and the European Enlightenment, not the Bible. For God’s sake, for the sake of all mankind, for the benefit of all that is holy, you cannot look at the concepts in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, and connect them with the oppressive tenets of “Historic Christianity.”
Even ignoring all his other lunacy, Skousen was fundamentally suicidal in falling into lock-step with Christian Nation theories. Declaring America a Christian Nation leads to Carthage Jail, Liberty Jail, the Haun’s Mill Massacre, Johnson’s Army and an American Geneva based upon Calvin’s oppressive “Christian” model.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Which brings me again brother Beck, to your personal political pornography, throughwhich you must enjoy yourself immensely and repeatedly if your gushing commentaries are any indication: The Five Thousand Year Leap. This is Klingon Skousen’s “inspired” masterpiece:
Since this book was all over the New York Times bestseller list in 2009, and generated an unprecedented interest in this until-now obscure author, it deserves an extended discussion. The book is an analysis of the Founding Fathers of the United States and their political and economic beliefs, written from a decidedly conservative (in the modern American sense) point of view, but the content is not particularly explicitly Mormon to the degree that would alienate readers of other faiths. The title of the book refers to both the author’s belief that the earth was about 5000 years old at the time of the founding of the United States, and also that social and economic progress took a great 5000 year leap forward nearly instantaneously upon the founding of the United States after centuries of slow progress and stagnation. The book was originally published in the wake of a conservative shift in American politics around the time of the election of Ronald Reagan, and more specifically in the context of a western U.S. protest movement against federal land policies circa 1981 known as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” which was especially strong in the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.
The book begins with a discussion of the political spectrum. Skousen asserts that the view of the “far right” as Fascism and the “far left” as Communism is erroneous and that Fascism and Communism are really the same thing: “ruler’s law” (or, law dictated by a single ruler or party). He proposes that a more accurate political spectrum would be: “far right” is anarchy or no government, “far left” is any form of “ruler’s law” or
totalitarianism, and the political center is a limited representative government of, by and for the people. The first section moves on to a discussion of the Founding Fathers and places both the Jeffersonian Democrats and the Hamiltonian Federalists in the political center of their day. He draws parallels between the laws and government of the ancient Israelites and Anglo-Saxon common law (and, although Skousen shows no sign of believing in British Israelism himself, cites a British Israelist writer – Howard B. Rand – as his source on this) and asserts that both were the basis of the U.S. Constitution. He believes the first attempt at forming a United States government in the Articles of Confederation failed because they erred too far toward his definition of the right (anarchy), while the strong-central-government faction of the Federalists and most European monarchieserred too far to the left (ruler’s law). The United States Constitution, on the other hand, was right in the center where it should have been. He attributes this to “28 principles” which he believes the Founders held to, and make up the second portion of the book:
- Natural law as the legitimate basis of government (he defines natural law here as divine law derived from God)
- A virtuous and moral people
- Virtuous and moral leaders
- Without religion a government of free people cannot be maintained
- All things were created by God
- All men are created equal
- Equal rights, not equal things
- Unalienable rights
- To protect man’s rights, God has revealed divine law
- Sovereignty of the people
- The majority of the people may alter or abolish a tyrannical government
- Republican form of government (“a republic, not a democracy”)
- Protection of the people against the human frailty of their rulers
- Property rights
- Free-market economics
- Separation of powers
- Checks and balances
- Importance of a written Constitution
- Limited powers of government
- Majority rule, minority rights
- Strong local self-government
- Government by law, not by men
- An educated electorate
- Peace through strength
- Avoid entangling alliances
- Protecting the role of the family
- Avoiding the burden of debt
- The United States has a “manifest destiny” to be a blessing to the entire human race
A fascinating mix, that. Many of these principles nobody would argue with; they are foundational to liberal democracy and representative government. Many of them however
try to make the case that liberal democracy (Skousen prefers them term “republic” over “democracy”) and representative government can only exist when they are rooted in religion, specificallyChristianity; and that the Founders were God-fearing Christians and this (rather than, say, the values of the European Enlightenment, freethought, and liberal views on religion such asDeism) were what guided the Founders. This attempt at shoehorning liberal representative government together with essentially theocratic views makes this book an early example of a genre of historical revisionism that has since become a staple within the religious right, such as the books by David Barton. Glenn Beck is a Mormon convert and it is likely that this is the reason that out of all the thousands of possible books he could have picked, he chose to bring Skousen’s book out of obscurity as a sort of manifesto; much of the religious right has instead been promoting the more recent books by David Barton. Beck seems to have picked up on the cue and now frequently has Barton on his television and radio shows to promote his
nonsenseviews. Beck’s promotion of Skousen’s work has led many ultraright conservatives to embrace Skousen’s distortion of the political spectrum, mainly for the purposes of blaming both Communism and Nazism on the left.
For you Gentiles out there, I’m not going to beat this White Horse to death. I’ll just summarize my thoughts by saying The 5000 Year Creep doesn’t give me either religious or political orgasms in the way Glenn Beck seems to experience the book. I’d simply say it’s his least asinine work.
Highlighted by Skousen’s self-damning ignorance of basic Christian theology, there are a number of elements in Glenn Beck’s confused potpourri of populist paranoia that are simply suicidal to Mormonism or any other non-Christian belief system. The first of these is buying into any suggestion that the Constitution of the United States of America is born of “Christian” roots. Anyone who knows anything about Christian history would not find that very enticing, even if he were a Christian.
Christians simply don’t know what’s good for them, and a Christian Nation isn’t good for anyone, not even them. If the nation is Christian, the State defines Christianity and stifles any competing theology. That’s not a good thing. To the average Christian idiot, it sounds great. The Founding Fathers weren’t however, the average Christian idiots.
Make the State Christian, and there’s always the chance you wouldn’t be the right sort of Christian, and end up on the rack or being publicly roasted. Facts are facts, and that’s exactly what every “Christian” society has done—when it was not engaged in the wholesale extermination of non-Christians or “heretical” Christians as it re-defined itself from time to time or its subjects found inspiration in other ideas. And Mormons are not Christians. Mormons would not only be seriously screwed-over in a “Christian Nation,” they already have been. Constantly and repeatedly from day-one. To believe otherwise makes you a lackey pawn, a dupe of what Christian Nation Crusader James Kennedy called “The Holy Conpiracy.”
And how did the Holy Conspiracy work its way around the Contitutional protection of Mormonism Glenn? Do you remember? Do you even know?
In a letter to William Short Thomas Jefferson wrote:
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. [13 April, 1820.]
Perhaps it’s Thomas Jefferson who should be called a prophet here? What else was going on in April of 1820 or thereabouts by the way…say in rural New York? And does this quote from Finis Ewing, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the most famous Presbyterian in the history of Morm
onism ring a bell?
The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.
Well Glenn, at first Christianity tried to just charge Joseph Smith with plain old heresy—again and again, from New York to Missouri, and when the charges never stuck they tried wrapping heresy around fraud or some other actual legal claim and they still never got Joseph nailed properly after scores of hearings and trials. Then the good Christian ministers of Daviess County Missouri held a little meeting of all the prominent clergy, civil officials, and leading citizens in the fellowship hall. Over coffee and treats they agreed that the Constitution didn’t offer sufficient protection from Mormonism, and if they didn’t do something about it they’d be overrun with Mormon and quickly be the minority vote in the region. So they penned out their own “Secret Constitution,” which the Mormons called the “Mob Manifesto,” in which the swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to eradicate Mormonism through any means necessary.
The Holy Conspiracy initially discovered that if you bully Mormons away from a public polling place during an election, they beat the crap out of you. They next discovered that if you shoot at Mormons trying to vote they shoot back. Then they learned that if they shot back they could call the governor, who was part of the conspiracy to negate the Mormon vote in the first place, and he’ll gratefully issue an order of extermination for you on the grounds of treason and insurrection. Only the fact that Mormons are pretty damned good with a rifle slowed this genocidal effort down enough that God eventually reached enough still-functionally “Christian” hearts that the regional population, the national population in general, began to ask, hey, isn’t burning, beating, raping, pillaging, slaughtering and tormenting plain dumb white men women and children sort of er, evil or something? (Injins, niggers–yeah. No problem. But white folks?)
When the local Christian clergy tried to get the Mormons eradicated again in Illinois, the Holy Conspiracy had learned its lesson well from Missouri. You didn’t need secret meetings and blood oaths. You didn’t need to try to construct a treatise of your legal or moral apologetics to justify your actions. All you had to do was publish abroad Christ’s permission to exterminate the Mormon heretics and take anything you want of them for plunder, and either just out of greed, bloodlust or even missplaced “Christian” zeal, via the “will no one rid me 
of this troublesome priest?” principle, a mob will cheerfully arise to oblige. You don’t need to control the whole state militia, all you need is a key officer or two, a mob-friendly detatchment or so, and once they start hollering and shooting and point at the “enemy,” the rest of the regiment will just join in out of reflex. Once you have the Mormons shooting back to defend themselves, well, the game is on, no more explanations necessary. Look at the Mormons. They’re shooting at us. Better kill them all before they do the same to us.
But even the Illinois tactics were transparent enough that “Christians” throughout the nation looked at the “mob” violence of Nauvoo and Carthage, and while nobody could directly claim this time that actual ministers of God were leading the charge under the Christian flag, it was still condemned as inexcusably uncivilized, whether Joe Smith and the Mormons had it coming or not. Sure, in Missouri they tried to trans-substantiate “heresy” into “insurrection” or “treason” but never got it to stick. So again, after a lot of manoevering and legal bullshite, Joseph Smith’s critics in Nauvoo managed to hang “treason” on his “heresy” for acting as chair of the city council and condemning an anti-Mormon printing press. That’s what actually got him killed mind you. But like Missouri, Smith never ended up in court. In Missouri he was allowed to escape to save the state the embarassment of trying to explain their extermination order and resulting attempted genocide. In Carthage Illinois, the militia “guards” protecting Smith just parted one night and let a barely disguised mob of their fellows up the stairs to shoot the hell out of him. Again, it saved the Holy Conspiracy from all the Constitutional bickering and Christianity as usual got what it wanted without the incumberance of due process.
In Utah, the Holy Conspiracy first denied Mormonism admittance to the union as its own State of Deseret,
despite more than meeting all requirements. As a state Mormons would be free to be the majority, grow, populate, civilize, and vote their own conscience and cultural or regional interests like any other citizen other of the United States. Congress however, amid much debate, admitted Utah only as a territory, where it could be administered directly by the Christian Congress.
When Brigham Young got tired of the cronies, whores, and carpetbaggers Washington kept sending out to profiteer off the blood and sweat of the Saints, as Governor, he fired an apparently unreliable guy named Magraw from the mail service, because Mormons had long been maintaining supply trails and outposts from coast-to-coast and simply tagging mail service onto the regular Mormon cargo contracts was faster and cheaper. Magraw turned out not surprizingly to have been awarded his 
mail contract via his well-placed Washington cronies, and like a good little Holy Conspirator, once again cried that the whole territory was in bondage of Brigham Young and disloyal to the United States. This resulted in Congress appointing a Christian governor, and sending him to usurp Brigham Young with an army of occupation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War
After a little drama, the Mormons let the new governor come right on in. The army, well, just so they got the message, that they starved out for a year, cut off and surrounded, vulnerable in the canyon. Cummings, the new guy, negotiated entry of the army, and basically nothing much happened. He reported back that nothing much seemed to be going on in the territory worth mentioning and wondered what all the fuss was about. But, the Christian camel having poked its nose into the Mormon tent, eventually the whole beast forced its way inside. And again, Christianity found it could do nothing much about Mormonism. Until it discovered polygamy.
And here’s where the Holy Conspiracy learned it could do with a stroke of the pen what it had been trying to do for decades through all the combined violence of modern warfare: they made polygamy illegal. No, it wasn’t already illegal. Nobody had thought to make it illegal. But this was Calvin’s America, and The Holy Conspiracy forged the polygamy issue into a sword it then aimed at the heart of Mormonism:
Reynolds v. United States (1878)
This was the first of the Mormon cases. Congress had passed a law making it a criminal offense to
commit bigamy in any of the territories under control of the Federal government. The defendant, charged with violating this law, asserted as a defense that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and that its doctrines required him to practice polygamy or plural marriage. He claimed further that enforcement of the law against him would violate his religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court rejected this contention and affirmed the conviction….
Marriage, the Court held, is a relationship created, regulated, and protected by civil authority. The monogamous family is the basis of Western societal life, and it was never doubted that government had the power to preserve it by prohibiting polygamy. The fact that the defendant’s religious convictions require him to practice polygamy no more immunizes him from the operation of the law than would a person’s religious belief in human sacrifice immunize him from the operation of the laws against homicide. To permit religious beliefs to justify polygamy would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and would in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself….
Page 109, Church and State in the United States , Anson Phelps Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, 1964, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
The Court’s reasoning isn’t even out of the Bible. It just pays lip-service to Christian tradition using the code-word “Western societal life” without any Biblical or Constitutional justification at all. Ignoring the spurious human sacrifice analogy, what this ruling actually does it wrest from the hands of God, the formerly Holy Bonds of Matrimony, and surrendered the institution of marriage to the authority of civil officers, who are now, by this precedent, free to administer it according to any currently popular social conventions. Like Gay marriage. Or at this point, polygamy.
Well Christianity, be careful what you wish for—you might get it. You put marriage under civil jurisdiction to feck over the Mormons, and now it’s your turn. You made marriage a strictly social and political issue, and now you’re on the losing side of the social argument, aren’t you? Payback’s a bitch isn’t she? And she doesn’t even make you breakfast in the morning.
Here, anyone wondering why Harry Reid might be a Democrat and a Mormon too ought to have a little look at this:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jishs/101.3-4/vitale.html
It’s a historical overview explaining how Joseph Smith voted Democrat as well, and more importantly why. As a matter of fact Glenn, in spite of self-righteous Far-Right elitists like yourself and Skousen, rather a helluva lot of Mormons are Democrats. A bunch of them are actually socialists. Probably a lot of actual Communist Party members of the church by now. It’s a big wide world.. It’s not all about Chief Skousen brown-nosing General Authorities and scaring the hell out of them with tales of world-shaking evil headed their way: Howdy brethren–what’s shakin’ on temple square today brother this and elder that. Have you heard the one about the Commie who snuck the tape recorder into the Endowment session and played it all on CCCP1?
OK, I’ll condense it: Joseph Smith was a Democrat because the Democrats like president James Buchannan initially argued that Mormons should be able to have their own state and make their own laws as they saw fit. Because the Democrats, not the Republicans, argued that the Consitution protected religious practices like plural marriages. Because the Democrats argued that specifically in polygamy there is no crime or peril to the greater good from what consenting adults want to get up to in the private sovereignty of their own homes and their own beds. Democrats argued that the citizens of a state or territory ought to be able to rule on the matter themselves according to their own social norms.
The Republicans, like party founder Justin Smith Morrill on the other hand, were arguing that Mormons were heretics and polygamy was as barbarous as slavery, and Mormons had no right to self-government in a “civilized” read: Christian, society:
Under the guise of religion, this people has established, and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world…. As well might religion be invoked to protect cannibalism or infanticide. Yet we are told, because our Constitution declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency that artful men may seek to hide, under the name of religion! However, it is impossible to twist the Constitution into the service of polygamy by any fair construction…. Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?
Sounds a bit like the Glenn Beck show. Or old recordings of Cleon Skousen.
Once Christianity finally had something with which to “legally” skewer the Mormons, once they’d essentially made at least one purely Biblical doctrine unique to Mormonism illegal on purely “Christian” grounds, they sharpened their anti-polygamy blades keener with every passing year. They wrote into laws test oaths that denied Mormons the right to vote. They defined as “treason,” not the practice of, but the mere belief in
polygamy as a Biblically correct principle. Then they made even being a member of an organization that believed plural marriage to be Biblically correct, a confession of “treason.” Then they declared all the lands, funds and properties of any “treasonous” organization should be forfeit to the territorial civil authorities. They banned Mormons from running for office, so soon all civil officers in the territory were appointed by Christians in Congress, or were fellow Christians elected by a tiny Christian minority who ruled the vast Mormon majority of the region.
I want to make this clear, and not just for you Glenn Beckers, neo-Skousenites, or other religious types reading this: The Holy Conspiracy, the “Christian Nation” and its “Christian” Supreme Court, ruled in 1878, that it was perfectly legal and Constitutional to deny anyone who disagrees with “Historic Christianity’s” system of beliefs the right to participate in American politics as either voter or candidate, to own land, property, or associate with like-minded Americans. Mormons were the first official victims of actual “thought crime” legislation. Christians used this one doctrinal tool, this one almost universally agreed-to but utterly harmless Mormon Biblical oddity, to systematically strip the Mormons of every scrap of property they had. They literally stole all Mormon edifices and meetinghouses and rented them back to the church under State supervision at great profit. They made every wife a Mormon husband could be proved to have cohabitated with, a crime punishable by five years in prison. They broke up families, threw old men in jail to rot and die and left the destitute, breadwinnerless wives and children to fend for themselves.
(And of course, they carefully wrote their anti-polygamy laws so the Army and teams of Washington carpetbaggers infesting the state could continue to hump and whore around as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t set up housekeeping or make their multiple-partnered sex a legitimate, permanent arrangement.)
Glenn. That’s how a “Christan Nation” works bub. Sorry. Just is. I’m not guessing here. You’re the guy who keeps telling us to learn from history before it’s too late.
Physician heal thyself.
Christians own their own damned label. I don’t want to fight over it. In any case, Mormons can’t simply steal it and redefine the word as they see fit. That may play well in Provo, but one Mormon backwater town in the desert doesn’t amount to diddly squat in the world of politics and religion—or even the world of dictionaries. The last thing in the universe a Mormon would want to do is hand over Constitutional sovereignty to a bunch of hard-core, Bible-thumping Christians. The Founding Fathers defeated these “Historical” Christians in writing the Constitution. They pulled one over on them–Joke’s on you Calvin, Wesley, Arminius, Augustine, Luther, Pope One and Pope Two. The Great Architect of the Universe faked-out all of history’s so-called “Christians” who had been thus far perpetually claiming to worship Him via beating the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them. The religious and intellectual rebels on the Constitutional panel with free and truly inspired hearts and minds wrote God’s true will into the Constitution instead.
That’s the Mormon position Glenn. That’s Joseph Smith’s “Original Argument.” If you believe Joseph Smith that is, rather than Klingon Skousen. I know who I’ll go with. How about you?
America is not a Christian Nation and I and grateful for that. America is a pluralistic, free republic, and open
religious society. We should all thank God, or the Deity of choice for it. Or no Deity at all. Thank the Founding Fathers. You may think me a weird-arse bigot and pinhead for believing anything in Mormonism, but the Constitution allows me to be a pinhead and bigot, and believe anything I want. I just don’t get to exercise my bigotry. That would infringe upon the rights of other citizens who are mutually protected by the Constitution. I can talk about it all I want though. And Glenn, one more time: That sort of religious liberty is not a Christian concept. Period.
Everybody gets their say, and nobody gets to hurt the other guy for saying it. God Bless America. Nature’s God.
Glenn Beck, you and your new “ghost” writing partner, the specter of Klingon Skousen, want to destroy America. You want to destroy the Constitution in order to save the Constitution. You want to put sinners who play cards or curse or skip church in stocks. You want to imprison or drive out homosexuals and free thinkers and scholars and anyone who would care to argue with the clergy to die alone in the wilderness. You want to burn witches and heretics–you just call them Communists and Progressives and Liberals. Glenn, you and no doubt Wee Willy Skousen would contend: that’s not what we want at all. But that’s certainly the way Police Chief Willard Cleon Skousen ran Salt Lake City when he had his crack at a theocracy. Of course you don’t want a Christian Police State Glenn. You preach about the dangers of incrementalism but you and Skousen’s ghost are both apparently too stupid to realize that’s what every single Christian Nation in the history of the world has led to.
The US Constitution is not the product of a Right Wing think tank. It’s the result of hard-fighting, enlightened,
classical Liberals. Skousen’s analysis of the world’s political spectrum is the infantile, ethnocentric groaning of a myopic, egocentric, provincial paranoid who’s only ever looked as far as the next church spaghetti dinner for his understanding of either politics or religion. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, these are entirely subjective and conditional terms. A Conservative Russian is a flaming Marxist. This terminology has never been either precise or absolute. Without a context and a comprehensive, overlooking frame of reference they are as useless as anything else Cleon Skousen doesn’t quite get. Which is rather a lot. Really Glenn, don’t you have an inkling of discernment in you? What’s “Liberal” in Provo is “Conservative” in Minneapolis. What’s “Conservative” in Austin Texas is Leftist Propaganda in Orem Utah.
I’ve got news for you Glenn Beck, the louts who looted and trashed the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle weren’t from the Right. They were raving Lefties. They were self-professed Anarchists. Anarchy does not come from the Right by any known definition of Right. Police Chief Cleon Skousen was a Right Wing Zealot and he did not represent the face of Anarchy. It’s inane. Skousen argues in effect, that since the Right is always for law and order, as he clearly is, that at some point the absolute most law and order you can have is Anarchy.
Because he’s an ass.
More blatantly Glenn, you and Skousen argue that all the violence today, all the totalitarian, Nanny-State, repressive governmental stifling of basic human rights, religious and intellectual freedom, comes from the Left. In quaint, Hannity or Limbaugh-era terms: The Problem is Liberals you say. You point out example after example and grin smugly, laughing at anyone who doesn’t catch your brilliance—daring the world to challenge your empirical masterwork. But you’ve missed a pretty obvious point Glenn.
Those officious shitebites you keep indicting aren’t Liberals. There aren’t any Liberals any more. Chairman Mao said: sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. Well, it has. They fought the Establishment, they beat the Establishment, and now they ARE the Establishment. They rocked the vote, and now they’re not going to rock the boat, and they won’t let you rock it either. What was radical, revolutionary, and represented the product of allowing period “Liberals” to think freely and explore alternatives to the existing political and social structure, has now been codified, canonized, carved in stone and will be just as vigorously beaten into the captive citizenry as any other retrograde, reactionary, Conservative movement. Opposing ideologies will be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
The guys who politically rescued Mormonism in spite of itself in the early days were Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Whigs and Republicans just wanted to wipe Mormons out. The only totalitarian regime ever to infiltrate and rule in this great land was the Puritan government at Plymouth Colony. America’s Children of the archetypal ruling Christian bastard, John Calvin, made the Taliban look like amateurs.
Willard Cleon Skousen had it all arse-backwards. Don’t follow this buffoon’s intellectual dyslexia ‘round and ‘round until your powers of reason disappear into your own arsehole as well.
If you won’t believe me, if you won’t believe Joseph Smith, perhaps you’ll believe James Madison:
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries. [James Madison, 1803 Letter objecting to use of state land for churches.]
Now, I led with that statement because it sums up my point so well. However, it’s become fashionable these days by “Christian Nation” zealots to claim this quote is not actually one of Madison’s. It has been long attributed to him but its provenance is a bit murky or so they now claim. Whoever said it, it is perfectly phrased to express what Madison would no doubt have said himself. I imagine that because it so perfectly also discredits the Holy Conspiracy’s claim that the Founding Fathers never really meant to build what Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church and State, it would be handy for them if he hadn’t said it. I wonder however, why the Holy Conspiracy is so exercised to disprove the validity of this sentiment, when Madison clearly says essentially the same thing repeatedly in a host of other absolutely unquestionable documents:
During almost fifteen centuries, has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution….
–Page 106, Christianity and the Constitution.
Nothwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment
of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov’ & Religion neither can be duly supported…. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov’ will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together; [James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt]
The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. [James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, Dec 3, 1821]
We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. [James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Assemby of Virginia]
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. [James Madison, 1819, in Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State]
Or as George Washington said in 1796 in signing the Treaty of Tripoli:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or
tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” [Emphasis mine.]
Every single Christian Nation eventually rises from it’s own repeatedly brutal self-extermination attempts saying, well, that’s all behind us now, we’ve finally fixed the religion—and then evolves into the same violently repressive culture yet again. Over and over. That is not Our Father in Heaven’s plan for America.
What Cleon Skousen missed, what you’re missing now Glenn Beck, is that the 5000 Year Leap made by the Founding Fathers in 1776, was deliberately and carefully aimed as far from the direction of a Christian Nation as they could launch themselves. Now you and your Holy Conspirators want to jump back into the Christian historical pit of darkness. Enlightenment came to America in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
That’s the great Bait-and-Switch ploy you aren’t seeing Brother Beck.
That’s the Christian Cycle Glenn.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Satan’s Plan.
Glenn.
Glenn Beck Part 1: High on a Mountain Top…
Until Glenn Beck came along, the only televangelist I ever found intriguing enough to give a damn about was decades back when Jim Bakker was building his impressive “Heritage Village” and Heritage USA theme park, which once almost rivaled Disneyland. Bakker had his time in the sun back in the mid 1980’s to about 1987, in the heyday of televangelism. It was a time when any evangelical, born-again, charismatic, freelance, weird-arsed pastor of some half-legitimate denomination could invent his own religion from scratch and promulgate whatever quasi-Biblical theories he pulled out of his backside and put it on the broadcast airwaves in almost complete secrecy. Nobody but the zealots were watching what went on, and you had to know what backwater radio or TV channel to dial in at some usually unpopular hour of the day to get the message. They had a favorable Conservative administration going for them and it was years before YouTube or Facebook made it a sure bet you would find every dumb-assed thing you said five minutes ago spread all over the globe for everyone to laugh at. The fact is, Bakker had me just about convinced that he was at least sincere in his Christian intentions when I suddenly found him exposed for frolicking with a church secretary in the storage closet on the cover of all the tabloids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_USA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker
http://www.lifeinthespiritradio.net/
http://www.heritageconferencecenter.org/
All Glenn Beck needs is a heavy coat of mascara to make those crying jags visually spect
acular and he’d even equal good old Tammy Faye Bakker’s shows of sincerity as she begged the viewing audience to help save their ministry for the good of the children and families they were serving. Not my main point. Sort of a cheap shot. But it had to be said.
Jim and Tammy’s “ministry” fell into one of the categories of the tent-show fraternity I’d have to classify as the “Drama Queen” school of fund raising. Faith Healers would be another sub-category of the broadcast revival tent circuit. Another evangelical branch calls itself the “Faith Message” or “Whole Gospel” ministry. The Drama Queens make their money and converts by building some huge, ostensibly beneficial monument to their own greatness or charity—like a Christian Family Theme Park, or a Children’s Medical Center, or a University. Every week then they invent (usually legitimate) some financial crisis that will destroy all their great work within days if such-and-such a donation goal is not met. The Faith Healers ostensibly obliterate cancers and tumors, re-grow kidneys and broken bones, speak holy-sounding gibberish whenever plain English isn’t selling the crowd, and for this entertainment their followers are so impressed by these Spiritual gifts that they throw money at them. The Faith Message types tell you that God wants you to be rich and all you have to do is prove your faith by sending them your paycheck every week and God will return it tenfold, or an hundredfold. They’ll also bless handkerchiefs and mail you one for a price as a “prayer cloth,” whatever that is. And of course, they all diversify and cross in and out along any of these lines as opportunity arises. Glenn Beck too, expropriates many of these techniques but his message doesn’t much fit into any of these main mission statements. Glenn Beck is however, a very keen member of what I call “The Prophet’s Club.”
Glenn Beck has strapped his saddle on the big White Horse of prophecy, mounted his steed and now wants to take us all along for the ride.
Glenn Beck didn’t invent eschatology—the peculiar Christian hobby of pondering mostly Bible-based “End Time” scenarios. But he’s the leading exponent of the craft today. But again, he’s functioning on a slightly different plane of existence than say, Hal Lindsay, the 1970’s Christian author who wrote the oddly popular The Late Great Planet Earth, popularizing his Zionist fables about the Book of Revelations that fadded out a generation ago but keep getting revived.
http://www.hallindsey.com/The thing about predicting the End of the World is, if you keep at it long enough eventually somebody will be right.
Obviously, as a Mormon, Glenn Beck also isn’t quite in sync with Lindsay’s fellow dispensationalists, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who in 1995 began their sixteen volume best-selling Christian series called Left Behind, attempting to scare the bejeezes out of their Christian readership just enough to cling to their faith in Christ–but hopefully not their wallets. Or, God forbid, give all their money and property away before buying the complete series.
Lindsay, LaHaye and Jenkins’ Rapture craze is still limping onward into the 21st century. Christians, mostly young ones, still buy their books, watch the particularly lame movie offshoots mostly under duress on a youth night with the hip young pastor “Bob” who wears a turtleneck and sweater vest instead of vestments or a suit and tie, and for those whom this Rapture scare is still new enough to be rapturous, they find consolation and peace in imaging they will thus avoid the imminent tribulations fated for the infidels and lesser Christians at the rise of the Antichrist, in their chronology, some seven years or so before the Glorious Second Coming in “Power.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Lindsey
Granted, Glenn Beck’s founding Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, was himself well into the dispensationalist, End Time-scenario camp. Dispensationalism was a school of Biblical examination that evolved most vigorously going into the first frenzied expectation of Christ’s mighty return at the end of the first millennium AD. It received another big boost going into the turn of this last millennium. Sadly, the program of the Second Coming repeatedly failed to go as its watchers and scholars planned, so the various Christian, Mormon and other apologists attempted to explain inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the way God and His relationship to mankind was portrayed in Holy Writ by making God’s Word contingent upon a related timetable of human development or Divine cultivation of the human race. If God didn’t “change” it seemed that at least the way he dealt with man, his rules, his commandments, his timing, math and calendaring, even his physical nature or lack thereof apparently did, as recorded through the ages, and throughout a host of changing environmental, social, and political venues all over the Bible, particularly between the Old and New Testaments. So theologians invented (I mean found evidence in the Bible…) that God had actually planned His Creation (and un-Creation) timetable in distinct epochs, o
r “dispensations,” each with sometimes radically different game plans, schedules, and therefore rules.
Unlike Christians, Mormons gravitated to a concept of non-fixed dispensations, of no particular set time period. The whole business of Apocalyptic Bible math never really figured into the Mormon Second Coming narratives. Date setting at least in official Mormon circles has never had much to do with their constant expectation that it could happen at any moment without warning. Or not. And early Mormon depictions of Jesus returning showed Him zooming down the Salt Lake Valley from On High to pop into the Salt Lake temple apparently.
In several Christian eschatological schools there emerged a promised period known as the “Rapture,” where the followers of Jesus would be caught up in glory at His Coming. Only after His chosen ones were safe in His bosom would God let all the bad things prophesied in the Apocalypse begin, like the seven-year rise and rule of Satan or the Anti-Christ on earth. This was first popularized by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century. As the time of “Tribulation” commences, it is generally boasted that the Christians (the true ones that is) would get a ringside seat in Paradise to watch their foolish non-Christian mortal compatriots suffer below. These theories are based in Biblical verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:15–7 . The pre/mid/-Tribulation Rapture theories became extremely popular around the turn of the 20th century. Hal Lindsay made the pre-Tribulation version most fabulously popular at the present.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture
http://executableoutlines.com/end/end_01.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation
Important “dispensations” in Christian and Mormon eschatology include particularly what the Mormons call the “Dispensation of the Fullness of Times,” in which Jesus returns in glory. In Mormon theory, and many Christian schools, there follows a thousand years of perfect, Godly earth life where evil is swept clean from the planet. Before that however, there is also this Tribulation time, featuring a the direct rule of Satan on earth and a big hairy battle to kick him and his followers out when Jesus comes. Generally, it is proposed that there are seven of these dispensations throughout Biblical time, and a lot of dispensationalist thought connects directly to the “Seven Seals” mentioned in Revelation 8. This passage discusses the opening of some figurative, “Seventh Seal,” which also has seven subsets of prophetic or allegorically predicted historical events that then ensue. Again, generally, with a few other favorite scriptures like the prophetic writings of Daniel, which they link all together, those who either try to narrow down the season of Christ’s Return, or those who actually try to name a date or a year, imagine it’s just a question of figuring out the symbolism, connecting it to current events and world players, and BINGO!
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/prophecy/revbook/trump1-5.html
http://www.gotquestions.org/seven-seals-trumpets.html
http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevnseal.htm
http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevnseal.htm
It is often assumed in the Mormon church that Joseph Smith, like his Christian competitors, spoke a lot about the Book of Relations or the End Time prophecies of Daniel and overtly engaged in promoting the imminent End of the World. This isn’t really true. He seems instead to have addressed the whole matter of sign-seeking and date-setting and Second Coming-guessing only to shut up those amongst his flock who were so caught up in the notion that Jesus would be in town by the weekend, that he felt obligated to set them straight.
http://www.exmormon.org.uk/tol_arch/whyprophets/prophets/j_smith.htm
In all honesty, while Glenn Beck may have it all figured out, not even Joseph Smith entirely nailed the subject of Christ’s Return before he was murdered. Indeed, neither the Mormon nor the Christian has ever been in agreement even amongst themselves over the order in which these Apocalyptic dispensations or inter-dispensational events will take place. Conclusions drawn from even the canon is up to great debate and there is no consensus. Furthermore, Apocalyptic prophecies outside the Bible have always been sucked into the eschatological whirlwind of signposts and revelatory wonderments, from Nostradamus (Nostradumbass as I call him) to the contemporary apostate Mormon version, the “Parowan Prophet.”
In 1984, a fringe lunatic in the outer reaches of the Utah wilderness named Leland Freeborn, foresaw nuclear mushroom clouds rising over the Wasatch Front and it got published in a regional rural tabloid. For a week or so his babblings sent half the state into U-Haul yards to load up their survival kits and head into the safety of Monument Valley several hundred miles south. The other half the state had “End of the World” parties at BYU and in public parks throughout Salt Lake City. The lines of believers-vs-scoffers were not drawn upon the usual Mormon/non-Mormon lines either. If that weren’t dumbfounding enough, the same character is still in business and has authored numerous “prophecies” right up to the present, which also haven’t come close to panning out. These include nationwide riots that the Russians were supposed to foment and take advantage of to lob nukes at the US after the election of Barack Obama, which Freeborn forecast in 2008.
http://www.parowanprophet.com/prophet%20intro.htm
http://www.parowanprophet.com/
http://www.livescience.com/3159-parowan-prophet-predicts-nuked-christmas.html
In the Mormon continuum, those same ostensibly devout Mormons who in 1984 trotted off to the canyons on the say-so of one of their apostate nutcases, were already food storaged-up and had head-fulls of paranoid Cold War nuke-yuh-lur hole-uh-cost scenarios and generations of LDS leadership perpetually urging each member to store a “year’s supply,” stemming primarily from the Great Depression era dustbowl mentality. Mormons have been infiltrated for decades now by political theories about a Soviet invasion and destruction of America, and this originally from the John Birch society, which became an insidious polluter of Mormon popular doctrine in the very late 50’s and early 1960’s, when church leaders like then apostle, and eventually president, Ezra Taft Benson, said it was the best thing since sliced bread. Mormonism has been sprung tight and fully cocked on a hair-trigger for generations, just waiting for the word to come down from On High or “The Balloon” to go up.
The Christian camp was also affected by the emergence of late-50’s Birch Society political conspiracies, but had always entertained its own uniquely paranoid evangelical fears as well. Since the late 70’s a faddish wave of Christian doomsayers that struggles for life still today, has produced numerous even more widely attended evangelical Christian versions of Utah’s quasi-Mormonish Leeland Freeborn. This began with American cultural overthrow theories centered around “cults,” which word incidentally, they so entirely re-defined in popular usage to always infer a Satanic or evil connotation that academia 
abandoned the word in favor of “newly emerging religions” in the 1980’s.
Most Christian prognosticators of Doomsday generally grasp at any prominent natural disaster, or rise of any petty tyrant in the political world, even the success of any particularly powerful capitalist who seems to be getting his way too much, as a timeline marker they link to one intellectually challenged Biblical signpost or another. None of them ever sticks entirely to the Bible or “orthodox” Christian
sources any more than the Mormons and quack-Mormons stick to their “authorized” sources. Not even the late Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of the Cults who first got the “cult” epithet to stick to Mormonism in the early 1970’s, actually based any of his dire warnings of a coming swarm of Satanic Pagans and Mormons, on either the Bible or for that matter, reality. His believers of course claim however, that this is exactly what he did—drew his conclusions entirely from the Bible.
Walter Martin in fact set himself up to be America’s primary judge of Christian orthodoxy, and his first effort in 1955, was to declare the 
Seventh-day Adventists “orthodox,” subclassing them as in the evangelical branch of the Church. This really pissed off most of evangelicals, but Martin stuck to his guns and went on to found the Christian Research Institute in 1960. The Christian Research Institute, went on to stick the label “cult” to anyone or anything Walter Martin didn’t think made the Christian roster, and he kept at them until it stuck in popular culture. He didn’t just go after Mormons and Moonies, he scrapped with many of his contemporaries in the “Christian” ministry field, and even hosted a self-descriptive radio show he titled, “The Bible Answer Man.” Martin and his CRI were one of the first pillars of a resurging American Christian purity movement that became the current Christian Nation Movement. The whole train of thought moving this forward is the notion of first purging the Church of “cults” and false Christians, and then purging the nation of them.
Walter Martin, the man who wrote The Rise of the Cults in 1955, and put Mormonism squarely in the threatening pack of “cults” on the rise, is also the mentor and forefather to most of the people Glenn Beck is now trying to rally behind him to put God back on the political throne of the United States of America. Unfortunately for Beck, they’re fine with putting God back on the throne of American government, they just don’t think it’s Glenn Beck’s God they want there.
Going into the 1980’s, evangelical Christian hucksters began expanding upon Walter Martin’s anti-“cult”
theories. Foremost of these would be subsequent witch hunters like Bob Larson and his Talk Radio conversations with demon-possessed teenagers, Bill Schnoebelen and his travelling xenophobe show where he reveals the dark secrets of every Godless secret order ever rumored to exist because he’s apparently been a major officer in all of them at one time or another, and the likes of the infamous Ed Decker and Dave Hunt, who really boosted anti-Mormonism in 1984, when they found the perfect boogie man for the young naïve Christian by making up outright fables about Mormonism and “proved” it clearly to a generation of 
Christianity’s most gullible servants by combining mostly fake footnotes and a load of nonsense with every anti-Mormon rumor ever recorded over the generations into the comically inflated book of blood libels, The Godmakers. Seeking bigger and bigger spiritual thrills, Christian conspiracy nuts moved their efforts forward into an evangelical social movement against what they now called the “occult,” taking it up a notch.
While not politically organized at first, the 70’s-late 1980’s burst of Christian End Time fury was propelled by theories about a fictional rise in Ritual Satanic Abuse, witchcraft, and devil worship in general. This occultic connection fad died out of the Christian medicine show circuit towards the end of the 1990’s, when several
psychological investigations proved that these spook finders had created an 
hysterical mental illness plague they’d hyped into existence themselves. It was a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, by then many of them were calling themselves “prophets,” and had redefined the word enough at least in the Charismatic sects to be comfortable applying it to themselves and those they felt spoke for God, even if it was in a stream of glossallalial gibberish. Bob Larson’s dialogue with teen demons got repeatedly exposed as nothing more than the classic use of a shill on the other end of the phone, and his travelling exorcism show likewise got caught with it’s pants down when various journalists exposed his use of shills and paid players in the act. Larson turned out also to have invented a “Vanilla Ice” sort of phony rock-and-roll background he used as a basis to impress his teen ministry client base. He claimed Jesus saved him from a debauched history of playing rock music at Christian youth dances, where he deliberately corrupted whole churches. Turns out he never had much of a band, it wasn’t very edgy anyway, and those who remember those youth dances say his tales of debauchery and drink were total bunk. Bob had his fake epiphany, formed a youth anti-rock ministry, and Bob and Christianity’s youth were saved etc. In his dreams that is.
When the Christian public actually got to the point that it knew enough Mormons that didn’t find Mormonism scary enough to pay money to see it berated, Decker and Hunt did their best to move into the anti-Masonic, “cult,” and various evil conspiracy trade. They also tried to boost their claims against Mormonism in light of several exposes of their utter lack of scholarship or basic accuracy in The Godmakers, and tried to pin the full “occult” label onto Mormonism. They hopped up their anti-Mormon efforts with a movie release and expanded their asinine circus act which featured models prancing onstage in “Mormon Magic Underwear,” and so forth, took it on the road around the nation’s church basements and fellowship halls, until at one point even the seasoned, venerated, anti-Mormon ministry run by Gerald and Sandra Tanner had to tell them basically to shut the feck up because they had no idea what they were talking about.
And to round out the era, Walter Martin suddenly died in 1989 and Hank Hanegraff, his sidekick for years, took over the CRI and the post of Bible Answer Man—and went about almost immediately reversing most of Martin’s theology, by thoroughly trashing the entire concept of a Pre-Millennial Rapture and Dispensationalism in general.
http://www.raptureready.com/who/Hank_Hanegraaff.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ralston_Martin
http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Makers
http://www.masonicinfo.com/schnoebelen.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Schnoebelen
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4208453336947193899#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Larson
http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss100/larson.htm
In fairness to Glenn Beck’s Christian friends and rivals, the Bible does talk about an event Christians can reasonably call the “Rapture,” in general terms. The most popular timing of this event however, in historical terms, has been after the Tribulation period. The Tribulation is basically shared ecumenically in the Apocalyptic trade. The highly debatable pre-Tribulation relocation of Christian ascension to Jesus however, allows the faithful to skip out on the openly Satanic domination of mankind the Tribulation is predicted to hold for anyone around to see it. All I can say is, this seems basically just a rather convenient recruiting tool.
In most modern End Time scenarios, Christian, Mormon, or otherwise, the Antichrist takes over the UN, seizes control of Israel, and presents himself to the world as its Savior. Somewhere in there the world fights the ultimate battle of good over evil in the valley of Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, which again is something the pre-Tribulatory Rapture 
proponents say the faithful get to avoid. Unfortunately, Even following a single narration of all the available and highly varied End Time theology is too complicated to outline in a few volumes, much less a few paragraphs. The whole End Time calendar suffice it to say, is and always has been highly subjective and only vaguely doctrinal in whatever Christian sect or denomination it has been formulated. This includes the Mormon version–or, make that Mormon versions.
Contrary to popular belief–even in the LDS population itself–the LDS church has never officially gotten into the “Chicken Little” business, except in the most vague and general way of urging preparedness for when it happens, whenever that might be, always however, conveniently including the allowance that it could happen at any time—including immediately. This nudge and a wink about possible End Time imminence from latter-day prophets is every bit as motivating to the Mormon body of faithful as a specific date and time would be to any run-on-the-mill devout Christian who has been sold on nailing the Rapture down to the split-second via strict Biblical numerology.
In order to homogenize John Birch-like political conspiracies, current events, a delusional sense of chosenness and paranoid fear of non-
Christians or “cults,” most so-called “historical” Christians who specialize in these End Time Biblical passages, have had to accept key changes in their attitude toward the “Christ Killers,” or in polite terms, the Jews, as they have been clearly described by very many Christian Church Fathers through the centuries. That the Jewish race has been cursed by “historical” Christianity is not debatable given the plethora of historical Christian literature and dogma blatantly saying so. Luther and Calvin both were raving anti-Semites so you can’t blame it all on the Popes either. The reason for this Christian
evangelical change of heart on the subject of Judaism, is that by actually reading many of these prophetic Biblical scriptures, these modern Christian scholars and Apocalyptic dabblers came to the sudden realization that the Jews are in fact still God’s Chosen People. Jesus, they realized, was a Jew. Jesus was also apparently quite happy being a Jew. Jesus came specifically to minister to his own people, the Jews, not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, not the Holy Roman Empire, not the Eastern Church founded by the Hellenized, Roman Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who wanted to kill Jesus. (St. Paul.)
In normal context Christianity has been able to explain away the Jewish Biblical blessing by claiming that they had their chance and blew it. They killed their own Messiah. Through Paul, most Protestants and the Eastern Church claim God took His blessing to the Gentiles and cast the Jews all over the face of the earth, cursing them as 
punishment. The Jews therefore have always made a comfortable fit in a host of Birch-like World conspiracies. For the Christian eschatologist however, in putting all the canonical evidences together and trying to make sense out of them, it became obvious that the re-establishment of the nation of Israel, the rebuilding of the temple there and an expected righteous Jewish return to the sacrifices of the Law of Moses, would be central to the whole series of Biblical events wrapping up man’s time on earth. This got them tagged with the epithet, “Christian Zionists.”
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/State/ZIONISM-+Background.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12516.htm
http://www.christianzionism.org/
http://www.911-strike.com/christian-zionists.htm
Mind you, not all Christian prophets of doom are on board with the idea of inextricably linking the End Time fate of the United States of America and the return of Christ to receive a Jewish Zion in Israel. Rather a lot of them figure Jesus and His New Jerusalem will be moved to southern California or something, and the Jews are going to be left holding the the bag as He thumbs his anthropomorphic nose at them while the Destroying Angel bakes them in a smoking crater after Armageddon. Many of them think Jesus is coming, and He may be coming back to Israel, but when He gets there it’s payback time for thems what done Him in.
At a rally sponsored by Jim Robison’s "Religious Roundtable" in 1980, Bailey Smith, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said:
"It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray, a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friends, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."
The late Jerry Falwell, Founder of the Moral Majority, and one of the “Christian Nation” movement’s first notable Christian Zionists, tried to recover:
"This is the time for Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and all Americans to rise above every effort to polarize us in our efforts to return the nation to a commitment to the moral values on which America was built."
Religion in America , W. Hudson, 1987, MacMillan, page 400, and also on page 186 of Southern Baptist Holy War , 1986, J. Barnhart, Texas Monthly Press, Austin TX.
Glenn Beck as a Mormon wasn’t the first to come up against Christianity’s problem with an Israel-based Apocalyptic orientation. The late Jerry Falwell, the late James Kennedy, founders of Christian lobby groups like the CRI, the American Family Institute and others, the originators of the latest Christian Nation movement, were banging heads with their own kind on the issue for over three decades before Glenn Beck ever climbed out of his bottle, got out of “Morning Zoo” Top-40 radio and discovered both God and the Talk-Jock format apparently at the same moment.
Though the Christian Nation movement is often linking the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount as the "Judeo-Christian" basis of American law and justice, neither of these is actually even implied in the Constitution. And most Christian Constitutional advocates would have a hard time accepting anything "Jewish" from the pages of the Bible except for those Ten Commandments. In reality, the Christian Nation tent a very small and exclusive one Mormons have never been, and never will be invited into with universal applause. If “authorities” and founders of the Christian Nation movement like Walter Martin don’t even think Roman Catholics make the cut, Mormons and Jews won’t ever pass the muster.
http://apprising.org/2008/10/12/dr-walter-martin-speaks-on-the-roman-catholic-church/
http://www.waltermartin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2067
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3s0rn7InSQ
While Christians are late in combining their “Christian Nation” theories with Apocalyptic Zionism, Mormons, if nothing else, have in fact led the charge in promulgating, and probably inventing, American Christian Zionism. As early as 1840-41, at the height of his own persecution and travails, Joseph Smith sent the Jewish convert Orson Hyde to Palestine to dedicate the land for the gathering of Israel. Most of Christianity at the time was very keen on seeing that this Jewish national and cultural reassembly did not happen. For instance, a lot of faithful Russian Orthodox lads presumed to throw Christ’s deadly retribution at the Jews very directly in the Czarist era pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some good Lutheran boys followed the trend toward ridding the Christian Master Race of the Jewish pests in NAZI Ger
many–trying to insure that the “diaspora” became the “die-outspora.” In contrast, the Mormon Orson Hyde was charged with the assignment to dedicate the Holy Land (not Utah mind you, the other Holy Land) for the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple, the return of Israel from the diaspora, and the coming of the Lord to receive and bless His Chosen Ones. (And Glenn Beck plans to be there when it happens, so get your tickets soon…) In the meantime, Joseph Smith was laying out street maps and architectural plans for the raising of New Jerusalem at Adam Ondi Ahman (billed as the site of the original Garden of Eden) along the east bluffs of the Grand River in Daviess County Missouri. In short, Mormons have always connected the US and Israel as the two choice nations uniquely sanctioned by God at the End of Days.
Mormons are so pro-Jew they believe that baptism into the church constitutes an adoption into the House Of Israel. They believe descendants of the tribe of Levi have the right to preside as a local bishop without counselors. For generations they called non-Mormons "Gentiles," unless they were Jews.
http://lds.org/scriptures/history-maps/photo-10?lang=eng
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire
Now, Glenn Beck and most other Mormons may mock the ongoing parade of Rapture-based Christian prophets
of doom in the media today, but the truth is, Mormonism has never been lacking in any of the same sort of speculations from the time of Joseph Smith onward. The early Saints wrote and acted both politically and doctrinally as if they thought Christ might show up at any moment, or at least by next week—a couple of months, maybe a year tops. The whole point of the Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints, which was tagged on when Smith ran into legal trademark complications) is to establish an infrastructure through which the returned Lord can administer the Kingdom of God on Earth.
As I began this tome, Glenn Beck was preparing to go on the air and lampoon the latest Christian shmuck to have predicted the Rapture and goofed. Apparently this particular dipchip made the same prediction about a decade ago and missed that one too—but blamed it on a math error and got away with it again this year. Before I had completed my research and started back into my first editing phase a day later, the dork had by then announced that it was an “Invisible Judgment Day,” and that the actual Rapture was going to take place on October 21st—five months off again, due to some damned accounting quirk. Prophecy moves pretty fast these days, so I guess if you’re reading this after 21 October 2011, you’ve been “Left Behind.”
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-spokane/planet-earth-misses-scheduled-may-21-2011-rapture
http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/
http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/05/18/may-21-2011-judgment-day-2/
Glenn’s target for particular lambasting the last month or so, has been our latest Rapture predicting cluck, an
88-year-old self-described “Bible student” who is probably going to meet Jesus soon one way or another in any case. His name is Harold Camping, and he’s head of something called “Family Radio Ministries.” He is not the first Christian minister to have to run and hide after one of these false Rapture alerts. There have been hundreds if not thousands of them since it became popular to predict the end of the world, back around the turn of the first century AD.
Beating Camping to the boast this Rapture season, some other Christian twit named Phil Rogers blogged the Rapture date to be January 27th 2011, then corrected himself the day before, and added ten more days for addition mistakes. Then he apologized for the whole thing ten days later, and is still predicting and re-predicting the Rapture based upon other absolutely clear Biblical theories that likewise make his numbers certain.
http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/jan2011/philr127.htm
http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/feb2011/philr29.htm
The Jehovah’s Witnesses still lead the tally board in utterly failed Christ Returns, with scores of them over the last hundred years in their sect alone. In 1988, popular radio preacher and author of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be In 1988 and On Borrowed Time, Edgar Wisenant, predicted the Rapture would come during Roshashona of that year, early September. Needless to say, the only person who disappeared from the face of the earth on Roshashona in 1988 was Edgar Wisenant.
http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/fire-in-my-bones/23081-dont-get-infected-with-last-days-fever
http://www.newagegod.com/HURImedia/HuricG2.htm
http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm
http://www.bible.ca/Jw-Prophecy.htm
Glenn Beck is the first commercially successful and widely respected Mormon mass-media evangelist. He’s so far succeeded in this effort by fixating upon only the most universal and superficial, beattitudinal-type Judeo-Christian elements of Biblical wisdom. He’s augmented this by superimposing a presumed common End Time belief over current political and world events that are clearly observable and fairly predictable, while only making the vaguest allusions to the attendant Apocalyptic, Biblical or theological implications of these world-changing elements, leaving his audience free to imagine whatever the hell connection they might want to make. Beck every day in effect, prophesies something big is about to happen, and every day never quite gets around to telling us what it is. And the next day, we all tune in again to see if this is the day he actually spells it all out for us. But no. Just another litany of the dozen or so elements he got “right,” over the year, and a promise at the very end of the show he’s in the process of developing something that will “blow your mind,” but isn’t free to divulge yet.
There is nothing new in Glenn Beck’s bag of tricks. Glenn Beck is what Utah Talk Radio was in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, when I was living in Provo. Beck may not even know that, being originally from the Pacific Northwest as I am. I don’t think Glenn Beck has ever been exposed to the full spectrum of Mormon survivalist, quasi-prophetic lunacy. He doesn’t seem to have been exposed to it long enough to grow jaded, disappointed, and then finally painfully bored with its writhing, evolutionary paranoia that cuts and pastes Holy Writ into regional Mormon folklore, repeatedly trumping up a frenzied narrative pointing to the “Next Big Thing,” that only ever comes up bust. Last week’s collage of random prophecies are shredded and re-pasted into a new roadmap of the Apocalypse, and the process begins again with a new script and a new prophetic leader.
Make no mistake about Glenn Beck. He’s a televangelist. Glenn Beck is running a broadcast ministry. In Mormon culture, this is unprecedented, and the notion of being paid to deliver the Word of God is what Mormons call “priestcraft,” and gets you excommunicated. So he’s treading a thin line there.
Glenn Beck’s argument against the charge of running a religious ministry would no doubt be that he does not
specifically proselytize anyone into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He would argue that his message is a universal faith in God, and God’s plan for the United States of America to be a haven for all believers in the “God of Creation,” or “Nature’s God,” as the Founding Fathers often referred to the Supreme Being. What Christians won’t immediately understand, is that this “Savior of the Constitution” scenario is an integral and centrally important principle of the Mormon “Gospel.” There’s nothing inherently sinister or nefarious about this Mormon doctrine at all mind you. Unlike “Historic” Christianity, there is no suggestion or even much of a desire in Mormonism to promote some sort of exclusively Mormon utopian American Government. Mormons simply believe that they are free to exercise their Constitutional rights to vote and motivate and lobby American society and law in as Godly a direction as they can manage within the bounds of the law. If that ends up with Mormons grossly outvoting everyone on everything then so be it. When they talk about “saving” the Constitution, they really mean saving it. For everyone—even the Christian bastards who have been hounding them since 1820. In the Mormon scenario however, nobody should be hounded like that ever again. This is likely one reason the American Family Association rated Mormon Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, one of the most pro-homosexual legislators of 1990 and scored him low on abortion and many other conservative Christian political staples.
http://www.votesmart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=53352
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/02/03/Orrin_Hatch_Open_to_DADT_Repeal/
Ironically from the Left, Orrin Hatch finds many, including the pro-Gay lobby calling him a homophobic moron
for saying that Gays and Lesbians didn’t pay tithing because politics was their religion. Not to mention the whole recent California Proposition 8 movement that singled out Mormons in general for opposing an initiative to make Gay marriage legal in that state. Oxymoronically, Mormon Senator Harry Reed, Democrat from another state largely founded by Mormons, Nevada, as Senate Majority Leader, led the party that was entirely opposed to Proposition 8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story
While the Gay Lefties are beating him up, we see that coming from the other direction, the John Birch society–which the Mormon church at one time practically owned–has gone to town on Orrin Hatch for not being a real conservative.
“The distaste for Hatch focused on what many Utah residents see as his capitulation on abortion, gun ownership, and homosexuality. As they arrived at the convention, delegates were handed a letter documenting Hatch’s softness on the all-important right-to-life issue. Some delegates were angered over his refusal to sign a pledge to veto judicial candidates who aren’t opposed to abortion. Upset supporters of the right to own a gun claimed that the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America had correctly blasted him for supporting several measures targeting private ownership of weapons, including a ban on an assortment of weapons in a huge crime bill, controls on sales at gun shows, and enforcement of trigger locks. Others recalled that, in 1990, the American Family Association publicly criticized Hatch for supporting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its "funding of pornography and anti-Christian art."
http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=87
And that’s also why Mormons are the common enemy of all. Remember that phrase, because it is the key to understanding the religion. The Left lumps Mormonism in with the foaming fundamentalists, and the foaming fundamentalists have been killing and oppressing Mormons for generations as dangerous heretics.
Glenn Beck would likely not see himself as a missionary, but he does indeed attempt to bring people to Christ, he does so however—as Glenn Beck or most Mormons would understand Christ. Beck does so with the inherent Mormon acceptance of anyone who accepts God under any name or title. To be even plainer, if you don’t sign up with the Mormon missionaries for a dunk, you’re still going to a heavenly paradise more grand than you could imagine. Christ’s sacrifice is universal and His Grace is freely given to all who accept Him—and nearly everyone will accept Christ either here or hereafter, because Mormonism doesn’t close the books when you kick the bucket.
Glenn Beck has no dogmatic reluctance to embrace anyone as a brother or sister in his personal or political work, because Mormons literally believe, unlike Christians, that we were God’s children before this mortal life, we are still God’s children, and we will remain brothers and sisters in the Great Beyond whatever our ultimate reward there may be. Mormons easily accept in a patriotic sense, anyone willing to admit some higher power exists and that this higher power has set America above the worldly rabble of nations to insure freedom and liberty for His/Its children.
The Christian perspective on the status of non-Christians however, is that they’re children of Satan. Full Stop. They burn in hell. Thus, in the Christian’s political realm, non-Christians can only have a Satanic and destructive influence on America, if allowed any political power whatsoever.
On 10 November, 1988, on "The Voice of Americanism," Dr. Stuart MacBirney recalled his impressions of the summer’s Olympic games:
"As I sat watching the ‘friendship dance’ performed by thousands of Korean traditional dancers, filling the field of Olympic Stadium, while others touched their tear-filled eyes in an expression that the East and West cultures stem from common roots of the Human Family, the Christians watching were left with a sick revulsion at thousands of deluded pagans, pretending we’re all part of the same Human Family, when in fact they are Buddhists and Hindus, sinners condemned to hell, and trying to lure us all into the pit with them."
http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/voices-shrill-dr-ws-mcbirnie-and-vast
There is no universal morality or "Judeo-Christian ethic" for those patriotic, American evangelicals fond of 
claiming to be “historic” Christians. "God" is the “Word” and the Word is the Bible. In the Christian scheme of things, social, personal, and political freedom is the total submission to Jesus Christ, God, AKA the Bible . The nation can only be free by subjugating "man’s law," to the Holy Bible. Christians believe no man can be Free unless yoked to the Bible.
James Robison was quite active in the pre-Beck Christian America frenzy before the turn of this century. Those Christian ministers as honest as Robison confessed openly that the entire movement they represent is literally arguing to scrap the legal structure of America in favor of the Bible.
"And if you do not believe the Bible, we have no basis for fellowship. And by believing the Bible, I mean believing that it is the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of the living, eternal God, that it’s God breathed, and that it must be proclaimed without apology in the power of the Holy Spirit."
Page 123, Robison’s, Thank God I’m Free .
In the Religious Right boom times of the late 20th century, Christian geniuses like the late James Kennedy even coined a word for what they were doing. Kennedy called it the “Holy Conspiracy.” He was joined by other noted Christian patriots like the late Walter Martin, Hank Hanegraaff, and the Christian Research Institute as it sprang up to fight “cults” and recapture America for Jesus. They published "Christian" voting guides and sponsored "God in Government" conferences to tell you and your elected officials precisely how to exercise "good Christian stewardship." But the Mormons weren’t invited to the last Christian America revolution. When the Mormons all rushed in to get a piece of it, they found the national association of “Christian” Boy scouts didn’t even want them at their Camporees.
http://jonrowe.blogspot.com/2005/07/holy-trinity-decision-another-favorite.html
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_boyscouts.html
http://dailyross.com/2010/02/the-bsas-mormon-problem/
http://www.suite101.com/content/mormon-parents-rejected-by-presbyterian-cub-scout-program-a299180
The same LDS apostle/prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, who got Mormons into the John Birch Society by droves, was
a lifelong booster of Scouting. He started in 1918 as an assistant Scout Master as the Mormon church was superseding it’s youth internal organization, the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association with Scouting USA. Young women remained in a separate internal church organization, but the 
young men were soon surrendered to Lord Baden-Powell until its entire young male religious training program was just a Mormon sponsored branch of Scouting USA. Like the Birch Society, Benson thought the Boy Scouts were very butch, well disciplined, patriotic, and wonderfully woodsy. On May 23, 1949 he was elected to the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. He attained all three of the highest national awards in the Boy Scouts of America—the Silver Beaver, the Silver Antelope, and the Silver Buffalo—as well as world Scouting’s international award, the Bronze Wolf.[6]
In the early days of Mormon Scouting, most boys loved to dress up, run through the woods, build camp fires, pitch tents and teepees, and pretend they were Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Mormon kids, and their older, often no more sophisticated counterparts in leadership, were no different, they just preferred to dress up and pretend to be Jim Bridger or Orrin Porter Rockwell. (Rockwell was Joseph Smith’s personal bodyguard, and Bridger was a mountain man and scout who opened up the Intermountain West.)
The Scouting takeover of the Mormon young men’s program was not without protest. A generation of Mormon parents and grandparents, in spite of authoritative Mormon Scouting boosters like Ezra Taft Benson or recent president Gordon B. Hinckley, thought of Boy Scouts as foul-mouthed ruffians and pyromaniacs unfit for church association. Two or three generations had to pass away before the opinionated Mormon pioneer stock would universally concede that Scouting, as re-defined by Mormonism, is God’s Divine plan for their children and grandchildren.
President Hinckley could have indeed bailed out on Scouting a few years back, amid screaming controversies
of Gay inclusion and Christian Scouting’s rejection of Mormonism in their national encampment events. Hinckley instead even more firmly entrenched the Mormon church in the Scouting program. The personal qualities Mormons seem to love most are perfectly embodied in Boy Scout lore and culture, according to the late Gordon B. Hinckley, who felt if every boy could be a Scout it would empty all the prisons. Unlike the Birch Society, which was never compulsory, just highly promoted, becoming a Boy Scout, and in recent years, becoming an Eagle Scout, is enforced as a required rite of passage in order to insure proper LDS credentials in later dating, mating, and employment endeavors within the Mormon community. LDS colleges and universities actually offer a program in professional Boy Scouting. http://www.ldsscouting.org/index.shtml
Scouting is just the sort of “program” Mormons have evolved and gravitated to in every aspect of their religion. Mormonism in large part is a collection of glorified clerks, bankers, bureaucrats and functionaries who worship the notion that exaltation can be organized, engineered, and manufactured by structuring the perfect universal “program,” and then cramming generations of youth and converts through it to construct a body of believers of absolutely reliable character and totally common experience. Mormons even boast of their leadership as being unexceptional people, common people. In Mormonism there is a glory in not being unusually gifted. Even Mormon leaders are believed to have been chosen because God has called them not because of their genius and personal value, but because they are the most humble of the bunch and the least interested in running the show. The problem with the Mormon approach to Scouting is exactly that. It’s not a program designed to bring out the best and brightest in the best and brightest. It’s a mandatory indoctrination designed to elevate you to the highest degree of youthful glory, exactly like very other good Mormon boy, and prepare you to follow-up your young life’s goal (Eagle Scout) with the next compulsory goal, your mission. And after that a temple marriage and children. And after that you make bishop, or stake president, or even higher church calling, all for quietly doing what you are told and not making waves. This process will repeat itself mindlessly, until Jesus comes and Personally explains what it’s actually all supposed to lead up to.
Because Scouting is now the official Mormon boy’s club, if you aren’t thrilled with tying square knots or having the bigger kids at camp steal all the canoes so you have to walk twenty minutes to meals three times a day clear around the lake while they paddle over easily in a couple of minutes, then it must mean there’s something wrong with you. Everybody else loves it—including “prophets of God” who have not just sanctioned it, but required it of you. In the Mormon world, Scouting is God’s assignment, and if you drop out, you drop out of God’s program.
Scouting organizations outside of Mormonism have severely criticized Mormon Scouting as a “joke,” that “cheapens” the Scouting name. Having seen their complaints from the inside, yes, it’s absolutely true that Mormon Scouting features “merit badge marathons” where its youth go from room-to-room around the ward house, passing merit badge requirements at stations every five or ten minutes. When a Mormon kid gets his Eagle Scout Award, they actually pin the badge on his mother.
http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/01/13/the-merits-of-the-boy-scouts/
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/02/15/34213.htm
http://www.boyacks.com/scouting/
http://reachupward.blogspot.com/2007/10/mediocre-lds-scouting.html
http://www.scouter.com/forums/viewThread.asp?threadID=292052&p=6
http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2009/02/scout-sunday/
Scouting’s Godfather, Lord Baden-Powell, apparently idled away his time while the mighty British Empire and all its men, weapons and resources were at "war" with Dutch South African farmers or the odd wild native villager, by writing children’s fables about "Red Indians," trailblazing, tracking, woodsmanship and frontier exploring. As he had begun his military career as a forward scout, in these grand retellings of his adventures and diagramming’s of his scouting skills, he inadvertently fantasized himself into building the secret boy’s club he never had as a child, because his nannies never let him play with the rougher, common boys. Which in hindsight, it appears, he may have had sexual desires for. But perhaps I’m too hard on the old chap. Scouting was a very Victorian sort of British fad and Baden-Powell was just the dashing, repressed homosexual example of the Glorious British Empire to booster it.
And of course, Baden-Powell was a Master Mason, so he had that going for him. Again, the whole Masonic brotherhood scenario is paralleled in the Boy Scout system of mastering skills and gaining knowledge. The same set of religious and philosophical beliefs espoused in Scouting are also common to the writings of the Founding Fathers, the Masons, and Mormon theology. Scouting is therefore just a perfect fit for the indoctrination of the young Mormon into LDS political, patriotic, and religious dogma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/baden-powell.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA
http://www.glgarden.org/ocg/archive1/baden.html
http://scout.org/en/about_scouting/facts_figures/baden_powell
Mormons have no active part in Masonry today, mostly because Masons don’t like the way they just move in and take over the lodge. But unlike Christians, Mormons look upon Masonic involvement in the nation as a good thing, not a demonic plot to enslave Christians. Masonry promotes healthy, God-fearing principles. Like the Scouts. In the Mormon world, patriotism, church, the Boy Scouts, holding big conferences, sitting in meetings and forming committees, it’s all a way of life. It’s all the same thing, nothing sinister, nothing all that secret, just organized. Faith must be organized—perhaps a holdover from the Methodist input to Mormonism. In that light, evangelical criticism of Glenn Beck is 
absolutely correct when his detractors claim he can’t keep his personal religion to himself. Beck can’t do that any more than they can. Not even quasi-Christian political action movements like the Boy Scouts and the late-great John Birch Society could tolerate Mormonism once Mormons actually started making significant operational decisions for these groups. Then the Mormons became a threat. Mormons just weren’t flying the right "Gospel Flag." And still aren’t. And never will.
Robert Slaydon, "Life in the Spirit," from an undated show in September 1988:
"Lots of religious ships are not flying the Gospel flag they’re flying its cousin’s flag. If a ship isn’t flying the right religious flag we’ve got every right to take our nuclear bombs and blown’em outa the water!
A man of God is a man of war! "
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 3: Out of the Woods
I’m having a hard time slogging through the repetitiously violent and repressive movements of historical Christianity. It must be done however just to get to the point where we can intelligently discuss Joseph Smith and all the “funny” ideas detractors claim he had. I suppose that’s one reason why Mormons don’t bother to do so any more on any level. It’s tedious, contentious, and the vast majority of self-professed Christians don’t know much about any of it either, nor would they care to debate it with any intellectual honesty.
Most devout Christians don’t really want to even try to understand their so-determined “non” Christian peers at all. That’s because, if you are not a “Christian” as they define it, you are not their peers. You are not their brothers in Christ and you should be treated like any other heathen. (http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/19/nation/la-na-alabama-governor-20110119) They want to “save” you, because you are going to hell if you don’t see things their way. It doesn’t matter to them if you worship the Great Money God, Space Aliens, or Satan Himself. Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, followers of Zeus, it’s all the same to the Christian. Some Christian political and social apologists today will beg off this very central Christian doctrine by sliding around it with the argument that, no, they’re not our brothers and sisters in Christ, but they’re still children of our Father in Heaven. Anyone without a head not already firmly planted in a very dark and cramped place, would reply, well, if you’re a Trinitarian our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ are exactly the same guy. It’s just more Christian “Mystery” gibberish.
The job of the Christian apologist in these enlightened times is to attempt to make fundamental Christian dogma sound pluralistically forgiving enough that the Christian can at least wait till you die of natural causes to let God dish out your eternal punishment. It sounds like the average Christian wouldn’t be inclined to hasten your demise because you didn’t measure up to their definition of “Christian.” The well-meaning but historically ignorant Christian will pretend his faith allows him to agree to disagree, to live in peaceful co-existence with the infidel in a culturally and religiously diverse republic. This however, has not been the “traditional” Christian social or political standard, or in fact shall I say, Christian military standard:
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war with the cross of Jesus going on before…
The late 1960’s produced the inventors of the “Jesus Freak” or “Red Letter Christian” modern embrace of the always loving and conciliatory words of Christ Himself. The concept of focusing almost entirely upon the teachings of Jesus is a very recent invention of the latter-day Christian recruiter. One of the most successful of these, Joel Osteen, who inherited the ministry of his father’s pioneering Houston Texas, Lakewood mega-church in 1999. He began to be pressed about his reluctance to send all non-Christians to hell in his sermons. This came to a timely inquisition mounted by fellow evangelicals framed by concurrent political events involving a prominent Mormon presidential candidate and other defense-of-family related political and social issues. Mormon elements and the evangelical Christian crowd had found themselves mixing together trying to meet mutually desired political results and it became imperative for Christian activists to draw lines for the future rule of the country after disposing of their temporary Mormon allies. Osteen replied essentially that he wasn’t going to be the one to define who was or wasn’t Christian, or who was or wasn’t going to heaven, Christian or not. Osteen said he was just trying to focus on the gospel of Christ’s gift of salvation and teachings of positive living. Osteen was immediately sent to the corner by his Christian fellows, with a dunce hat on his head.
Osteen is just the latest “Christian” with half a brain in his head to actually sit back and examine some of the preposterously evil tenets of “traditional” Christianity and try to find a way out of its inherently stupid
consequences. But in Christian circles, this sort of open thinking, or frankly, thinking at all, brings very active protest from the Christian establishment as quickly now as it did in Joseph Smith’s time. Osteen’s church has been literally mobbed and assailed by his fellow evangelical Christians in protest of his attempts to make the Christian faith sound intelligent and enlightened. A Mormon might be inclined to take Osteen’s side in this debate, but this won’t help Osteen any. His Christian protesters are right. Allowing the acceptance of Christ alone to be the primary indicator of a “Christian” faith represents a serious surrender of centuries upon centuries of stridently developed basic Christian dogma. The notion that non-Christians might not only avoid burning in hell but actually go to heaven is unthinkable in “orthodox” Christianity. http://www.av1611.org/osteen.html http://www.safeguardyoursoul.com/html/joel_osteen_exposed.html http://www.forgottenword.org/osteen.html http://www.blog.joelx.com/joel-osteen-megachurch-pastor-without-christ/668/
One of Osteen’s problems is that he did not suffer the lengthy education of divinity school or any sort of seminary, wherein he could have been properly conditioned to read the Bible in general, and the words of Christ in particular, in a properly slanted direction. Most Christian theologians, scholars and clergies through the ages have concluded that God deliberately created the savage, the heathen, the “non” Christian fundamentally without hope of salvation and of little or no worth to God or man. Christianity differs only in its understanding of whether or not God saves these worthless humans all on His own according to His whims, or if man has any sort of power or obligation to ask to be redeemed from his natural-born sentence in hell. In some cases, even the most current Christian theologians will propose clearly and boldly when asked, that natural-born man is entirely the spiritual creation of the devil, and physically born of filthy parents on a filthy planet that has been surrendered in God’s disgust to Satan. In most of Christianity, man is not only no son of God spiritually or physically, but he’s some other creature entirely created body and soul by Satan.
I use the word “legislation” here very purposefully, because that is exactly what the collections of bishops and Christian councils through the ages have been doing—legislating their particular Christian beliefs and setting
appropriate punishments for not conforming to the religious-political bills they have thus authored. Christianity as it is popularly known today, based upon these generations of arguments and committee decisions made “orthodox” only by brute force, is no more infallible or inspired than your local city council meeting. The main difference between a city council meeting and say, the Council of Nice , is that if you lose the vote in a city council meeting they don’t draw and quarter you in the local park and sell tickets to the spectacle to fund youth hockey. (Unless you’re talking about my city council meetings…) Christian tradition is a litany of club rules no more “True” than the charter and by-laws of your neighborhood bowling league and bears no higher spiritual or moral authority to send you to either heaven or hell than the Cub Scouts or the Rotary Club.
All politics is local they say, and that’s exactly the level at which every now monumental Christian sect and tradition began. Through the centuries these local movements have fought, won, lost, amalgamated, grown, conquered and spread into worldwide institutions. But they all started with one, two, a handful of non-spectacular local guys with a few big ideas they pulled out of the Bible or a few “purifying” gospel gimmicks like full-immersion baptism or changing the Sabbath back to Saturday. They just kept selling their innovations or “restorations” or “reformations” by hook or crook, or through brute political force whenever possible. And then they outlawed and obliterated anyone or anything that preceded or opposed them.
The same of course, can be said of Mormonism—with the exception of these processes being almost utterly internalized. Brigham Young in particular was a very heavy-handed nation builder. He took Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, English, Irish, Scottish Immigrants, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and converted them directly into Mormons. Not Americans, but Mormons. Deseret Mormons.
Apart from an incident or two however, Mormons have made no effort at all to use any sort militant force to expand and conquer the Christian world by force. Since conquering pagans by force of arms is the history of Christianity itself however, Mormonism’s Christian opponents in the United States in particular, have always had tremendous fear that Mormon subjugation would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Mormons to have human and civil rights like any other citizen. Christians were already in the process of subjugating heathens in America and they naturally concluded that Mormons would do the same thing to them if they ever got a political or social foothold in a constitutional republic that protected their minority world view.
While Mormonism hasn’t obliterated American Christianity by any means even in its Utah home, within the traditions and educational history of the LDS church itself today however, and Insofar as present-day Mormonism is concerned, they’ve erased the entire history of Christianity right up until Joseph Smith was old enough to read a Bible.
In the Beginning, God created Joseph Smith.
This brings me back to my point of this collection of exploratory essays: God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ didn’t choose Brigham Young or John Taylor or any of Smith’s other better educated, better read and better prepared contemporary LDS church founders; Deity chose to appear to Joseph Smith. You would think the Mormon would thus be interested in understanding what Joseph Smith was all about at the time this choice was made. But not so. Joseph Smith was a Christian. Most Mormons today don’t even know what a Christian is.
In his own words, Joseph Smith was just a confused kid in an era and in a region of the frontier United States that enjoyed its religion the way we’d go to a movie or sporting event today. It was what Joseph Smith did instead of watching TV or playing video games. The religion of the Smith’s day and chief sport in Joseph’s neighborhood was Mainstream Protestantism. They had a league and a set of rules, and you had to play the religion game their way or you were kicked off the field and out of the association of professional American religionists.
This is still particularly true of the sort of devout Christian who likes to mount the ever-popular anti-Mormon,
anti-“cult” and anti-everyone-else sorts of crusades. It’s religious glory. It’s entertainment. It’s a living. Their mission isn’t one of helping you to understand the followers of the “false” gods they parade before the trembling faithful. The mission of these professional Christian spook-chasers is to bring the intellectually curious or wavering Christian back to Jesus by illustrating to them that exploring other religions leads only to blackest hell and eternal torment. These sorts of itinerant anti-Mormon, anti-cult crusaders make a fair living reassuring their fellow Christian meal tickets that their salvation is secure, and giving them just one more reason to feel even better about themselves being Christians. That, and just sitting around being pious or thinking of good works to do is boring as hell. http://www.boblarson.org/ http://www.demontest.com/
http://www.waltermartin.com/whatsnew.htmlChristian faith is, in general, every bit the product of “occultic mind control” and “blind obedience” as Christian critics claim Mormonism to be. Most Christians were born Roman Catholic or Anglican or Lutheran or Baptist or whatever, and they don’t even know what that really entails other than party loyalty. They love Jesus. They know the Bible is the Word of God. They accept at face value that Bible says exactly what their clergy says it says, and that it comes to us exactly as God wrote it personally. Most of them recite lengthy creeds and prayers every week that just clang like cheerful little bells in their ears and make them feel better but make little sense to them.
When most Christians come up with questions their ministers and clergy can only dodge or answer inanely with an allusion to the “mysteries of God,” they frankly just aren’t motivated enough by sheer intellectual curiosity or spiritual insight to push beyond this unsatisfying response. So they passively concede the point and accept that some day when they are carried up to meet Jesus, they may start to understand how stupid they were for thinking that so many of their central church doctrines sounded idiotic, cruel, and heartless. They’ll look into their Savior’s eyes and suddenly realize, yeah, I get it now: You created those savages out in the jungle expressly so they could burn in hell. You put them there and prevented anyone from reaching them with a Bible because you were going to send them to hell anyway. That makes total sense to me now. That’s not cruel or unfair at all. You meant for it to be that way because you created them inherently worthy of hell. How could I have been so ignorant?
Because God’s will is a “mystery” beyond human comprehension, the discerning Christian will try very earnestly to stop being quite so discerning until all the overtly stupid parts of their religion no longer bother them. They will quietly and faithfully accept that they are saved from the fires of damnation. That’s the important thing. Those other guys aren’t. Those errant denominations, those false Christians, those non-Christians–as good as they might be in earthly terms–they’re going to hell and we aren’t. That’s all that’s important in the end.
Now, nowhere and at no time more than in Joseph Smith’s young America was
this revivalist Christian war against the human intellect fought more fervently and openly between the competing branches of professional Christian recruiters. No criticism, no examination of Mormonism would be fair or informed without knowing exactly what Joseph Smith and his period fellows were responding to in their local Christian environment. Remember; God Himself was prompted to come down and straighten out the whole American Christian mess—if you believe Joseph Smith. That is the argument here you know.
http://homepage.mac.com/oldtownman/civilwar/01/burned.html
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_burnedoverdistrict.htm
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780815337928/
http://elektratig.blogspot.com/2009/02/burned-over-district-vs-passed-over.html
Why Smith? Why America? Why then? Christianity had already decided amongst itself on various levels back and forth, over, across, up and down the globe, that Christ’s Church had in fact fallen all apart—several times and then some. They differed only on matters of how far the Great Apostasy had progressed and of course each little sect claimed to have either escaped it as a secret branch of “True Believers” or claimed to have “Reformed” the Church before it collapsed entirely. Most of the big Christian dogs acknowledged major failings in the Church but claimed that God had used a corrupt system in a corrupt institution run by corrupt men to pass along His perfect and unsullied Truth through “Divine Providence.”
Christianity had indeed been arguing the same question Joseph Smith was asking when he came back from the revival tents and tried to sit down with a Bible and make sense of their competing ideas: Ok then, Smith wondered, which of this stuff is actually gospel and who gets to say what’s in and what’s out? Until Joseph Smith however, every time Christianity brought one of these authoritative arguments to a head, the most politically connected side “won” and the other side became “heretics.” Joseph as it happened this time around, was protected under a spanking-new constitutional republic that granted him the unalienable right to worship in any manner he pleased without fear of legal reprisal. If convention, conformity, and peer ridicule wouldn’t work, America’s Christian industry needed to eventually invent ways around the law and Constitution, the Bill of Rights, so they could ban Smith’s ideas and kill this heretic anyway.
http://www.exvampire.com/
Joseph Smith’s entire post-vision history from a legal and sociological standpoint can be summed up as a case of professional American Protestants repeatedly finding themselves out of luck on the score of being able to convict him of heresy and burn him as a witch. They struggled for decades at it and then finally tried to go for treason instead. When it became clear that he’d obviously win that court battle too, like he had won acquittal over the years on scores of their other legal gambits against him, they just formed a mob, stormed the jail and shot him dead. http://www.relfe.com/07/Bill_William_Schnoebelen.html
Though Joseph Smith’s Christian detractors were arguing complaints against him as if Christianity was the official state or national religion, the Founding Fathers had already realized that if you do make Christianity the State religion, the first thing that would happen is the state and federal government would be empowered to define what was and wasn’t “Christianity” all on its own. This would allow the government to stifle, foster, proscribe, and persecute, whoever and whatever it deemed not to be “Christian,” or “Christian enough.” The Founding Fathers decided by Constitutional amendment, that there were never going to be any “official” heretics in the United States. Oh, there were plenty of “heretics” around mind you, and still are. The Founding fathers, many of them, were just as particular about their “orthodoxy” as Joseph Smith’s critics. The authors of the US Constitution however, just felt that the Church and/or State had no right to take these heretics down to the church basement with the local mayor and sheriff, beat a confession out of them with a blowtorch and an axe handle, and then burn them to a crisp in a public square or hang them from the nearest tree, in “traditional” Christian fashion.
Joseph Smith, like Jesus lecturing his elders in the temple as a child, passed into full heresy by alluding to his frontier American Christian clergymen and their various denominations as “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” http://scripturetext.com/2_timothy/3-5.htm This turning of scripture against those who claimed to profess its infallibility is particularly annoying to those being thus belittled. It’s a great putdown if nothing else. But really understanding what he meant by this isn’t possible unless you’ve spent the same childhood trotting from preacher to preacher, revival to revival, stump-sermon-to-stump-sermon in rural New York at the dawn of the 19th century. To understand Joseph Smith and all those who followed him into his radically liberal new form of 19th century heresy, you first have to understand what Smith’s home-town country preachers were sermonizing about all his life.
Joseph Smith started out a fervent Bible-believing Christian from a family of longstandingly fervent Bible-believing Christians, and yet became so disenchanted with the local promoters of this belief system, that he rejected many of the basic institutionalized doctrines of the religion itself. He did that entirely without the help of any angels. This is no small observation. Joseph Smith came to his heretical opinions primarily through the Bible. Modern Mormonism imagines it has taught itself about its history and formative leadership, but this amounts all too often to a superficial wallowing in self-indulgent tribute to the saintliness of joseph Smith and lesser Mormon demigods like Brigham Young. In reality, modern Mormonism has so sanitized and saintified its founders that it has no clue just how brilliant and insightful the foundational doctrines of Mormonism are.
In reality, Joseph Smith was a beer-drinking, stick-fighting, pioneer prophet who died with a belly full of wine and a flaming gun in his hand. Joseph Smith went out of this life in a hail of bullets and a blaze of glory, bringing down his assailants shot-by-shot. Even the mob that killed him essentially said, He lived good and he died good. (Footnote pg 285 BH Roberts Comprehensive History, from journal of PP Pratt.) Brigham Young by contrast, limped his wagon into the Salt Lake Valley a couple of years later, sat his portly old sack of bones wearily up from his sickbed in the back, puked over the side, said, “This is far enough, this is the place,” and set immediately about rebuilding Joseph’s radical little church into a docile Quaker’s Paradise.
Because it does not educate itself about “normal” Christianity, the sort of Christianity Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” was prompted by and the religious environment in which Mormonism was cultivated, the Utah Mormon culture is quite incapable of understanding, much less appreciating the nature, meaning, or beauty of the conversion experience they so pretend to admire in their pioneer ancestors. Simply put, you can’t emulate the original pioneer spirit sitting on your fat Mormon backsides in a comfortable Wasatch Front hideout for nearly two-hundred years trying to convince yourself that church basketball is as entertaining as the NBA and local Mormon musicals are every bit as good as Broadway simply because it’s by Mormons and for Mormons. You can’t then then pop your heads out of the dust into the real world after almost two centuries , and expect to carry on a sensible conversation with actual Christians as if you’ve really got anything in common with them any more. You don’t. Even the so-called “Christians” who invaded the peaceful Mormon valleys came out primarily to badger and hound and “civilize” and otherwise persecute Mormonism, so even the Christians Mormons have been in contact with out there remain an aberrant bent and Mormons have been ignoring if not shunning them outright for generations anyway.
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, yes, all of those founding Mormon saints had everything in common with the greater Christian world. They were Christians from various accepted Christian sects and they’d already decided that Christianity was pretty screwed up before they ever ran into Joseph Smith. They had all independently come to find the same complaints against Christianity that Smith was addressing. They weren’t sure what was true any more, but they knew what wasn’t true. They may not have known exactly how to fix Christianity, but they spoke the same language. They thought the same thoughts. When Joseph Smith appeared before them giving new “Christian” answers that suddenly seemed to make sense, they accepted his inspiration because they’d already been through the same questions and prayed themselves into similar conclusions. All today’s modern Utah Mormon culture has left of this magnificent spiritual awakening is a correlated system of answers to questions they don’t know enough to ask in the first place. They know these answers are true only because the “Prophet” (insert current name here………) says so. For the native Utah Mormon this is a sad, shallow experience compared to their pioneer ancestors. And the whole truth of the matter is, the modern Utah Mormon experience simply can’t pretend to be worthy of the heart and soul of its newfound converts outside the Wasatch Front who are re-creating that pioneer Mormon rebirth on an ongoing basis.
The Mormon missionary program for one is little more than a sales-pitch made up of rote prattle that the young missionary has no understanding of whatsoever. Many now prevalent Mormon recruitment fables are actually embarrassingly contrived when presented to a Christian with any sort of Biblical education at all. In Matthew 16:18, Mormonism has back-engineered for example, a great Biblical argument to explain its own authority versus the Roman Catholic Church. The Romans for some time how have claimed this verse as proof of a direct blessing upon the Roman Church by Christ Himself. Protestants and the Eastern Church have however, debunked this verse for ages. When Mormonism inserts itself into the equation amid these two or three longstanding lines of interpretation, Mormonism just looks a little contrived and “me too.”
Whenever it was that Mormonism first eventually came into contact with the Roman Church and its proponents, it apparently never occurred to LDS leadership and apologists that there is no inherent need to prove via the Bible or Church tradition that Joseph Smith had the “authority” to found the most correct version of the Church of Christ. Most people would think that God coming down personally and telling Joseph Smith that he was the guy would be enough to make the prospective Mormon happy on that score. If Joseph Smith talking to God directly doesn’t impress you enough to believe he’s authorized to organize “The Church” you’ve just got no reason to join up. http://bible.cc/matthew/16-18.htm
But yes, if you have to scrounge up something in the Bible, Mormons can say Peter was the not the “rock” upon which the Church would be built, but it was the notion that Peter had come to know Jesus was the Christ through personal “revelation” to which Christ was speaking in this verse. Mormons claim then that It’s revelation the Church would be built upon. Peter is a Greek word meaning “rock,” and you could say that Jesus is making a pun here in saying that it wasn’t going to be Peter “The Rock” but a different “rock.”
And I say also unto thee, That thou art a “rock” Peter, but upon this rock instead–this whole revelation thing you’re talking about here–I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Matthew 16:18 Pro-Smith Version
Mormons say Jesus refers to revelation . To read it that way however, the word “but” should replace “and.” It would also help if you were drunk, because you can check any manuscript or translation you want, but it always says, “and.” The Mormon interpretation relies heavily upon connecting the previous verse’s inflection I suppose: Yeah, you’re one kind of a rock Peter, and (but) upon this similar rock, (your personal revelation that is) I’m going to found my Church…
Joseph Smith’s Protestant peers however, have generations of anti-Pope rebuttal arguments that just seem to make far more sense than the Mormon attempt to hijack this blessing. Protestants have long said that Jesus was simply referring to Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, and the Church would be built upon this principle of confessing Christ to be your Savior. Related Protestant interpretations have argued that that Jesus referred to the object of Peter’s confession itself, the Person of Jesus, meaning that Jesus was acknowledging that He was indeed the Christ and that His Church would be built upon Himself and the salvation He offers.
By relying upon this sort of interpretive reading, even out of the Bible, you are unfortunately playing the same self-limiting religious game in which Joseph Smith felt trapped. Young Joe indeed went out into the grove to pray his way out of this pointless self-imposed maze of self-defeating Old-World Christian Biblical lobotomizing. Joseph had been through the Bible back-to-front-to-back-again. He’d heard every scripture in the Bible read to him every which-way; upside-down, sideways and backwards. As a result, Joseph Smith had only concluded that religious professors were not much help in understanding Christian dogma even if they meant well. The only clear and universal answer he could find in the Bible was to take his questions directly to God and expect a direct reply. (James 1:5) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%201:5&version=KJV
Quoting the Bible with a Mormon spin only sounds great if you give a damn about the Roman Church’s claim to primacy in the first place. Mormons have been pointlessly spinning and bashing that verse for absolutely no reason for going on two centuries now. Why? This Roman claim of primacy is a claim that the Roman Church took almost two millennia to concoct for itself and finally lobby itself into agreeing upon in the first place. That passage could in fact mean exactly what the Roman Church says it means and it would entirely irrelevant to Mormonism. The Mormon claim to authority doesn’t come out of agreeing upon an interpretation of what is or isn’t in the canon, and then agreeing upon what the canon actually means word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase. The Mormon claim to authority comes from God picking Joseph Smith to reorganize the Church and replace that whole process with a direct pipeline of communication from God’s mouth to Man’s ear. In any case, the Roman Church in everyone’s eyes obviously went straight to hell after Peter died anyway as far as anyone but the Romans are concerned. Rock or no Rock, Peter, Pope and all, you still have all the historical proof of Joseph Smith’s “Great Apostasy” even if the Romans are reading that verse correctly as some sort of initial blessing on Peter.
Roman Catholics were a scarce commodity in early America however. Joseph Smith didn’t go into the woods to pray about the primacy of a Roman Pope. The claims of the Pope in Rome were all but irrelevant in early American politics and religion. All the details of the generations of hardened religious arguments attendant to the Eastern Church v Western Church, or Roman Catholicism v Reformation were dumped happily on the other side of the pond insofar as American Christianity was concerned in Joseph Smith’s day. Papists were just bad. Papists were loyal to Rome, not America. No further discussion really. There may have been pockets of Roman Catholics here and there, but they were curiosities more than primary religious movers and shakers relative to Joseph Smith’s experience. America was about hard-core Protestantism at full throttle.
Almo
st at the same moment Joseph Smith was having visions in the trees, American Protestants were wrapping up their religious, social, and political mandate in a concept that came to be known as “Manifest Destiny.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny This concept specifically named the “Anglo-Saxon” race’s God-given assignment to fill the North American continent from sea-to-shining-sea with devout Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (I can’t explain how such a large portion of this allegedly Anglo-Saxon blessing was actually perpetrated upon its victims by Norman, Irish, Scottish, or English/Nordic stock.) The specificity of this in all honesty “just plain white people’s” commission from the Almighty became very evident in several bits of legislation and forced removals of the highly peaceful and Christianized “Five Civilized Tribes” from the company of their White Anglo-Saxon Christian brothers in the Eastern states. This ethnic cleansing culminated in 1839 along the “White Man’s Trail of Tears” that left 4000 Cherokee dead and the rest half-frozen, half-naked and starving along the forced winter march from their homeland in the East to a piece of crap reservation in the raw frontier of Oklahoma. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears The Five Civilized Tribes were called so because they were almost entirely assimilated into “White” society and culture. They were some very serious Protestant Christians among their other “civilized” qualities. But that wasn’t quite enough. They were still “Indian,” and they were taking up some very convenient proper
ty the Anglo-Saxon Master Race wanted to use at the moment. Joseph Smith and his Mormon adventure into not quite good enough American Christianity ended in almost exactly the same result for the very same reasons.
Of course today’s Christians resent any comparison to their treatment of Native Americans or Mormons for that ma
tter, with the actions of one Adolph Hitler. Manifest destiny, and the several Mormon Extermination orders drafted, some officially and legally, were pretty much the same program Hitler was using to justify the expansion of his own state religion and absorption of surrounding lands, peoples and cultures into it. http://basangpanaginip.blogspot.com/2007/02/hitler-man-who-used-evangelical.html
Almost co-incident with the Protestant Illinois and Missouri-based mobs that killed Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail in 1844, there was a series of major Protestant mobs that formed in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love” to riot and kill or drive the Roman Catholics out of that city’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant American Paradise. http://www.aoh61.com/history/bible/phila_bible_riots.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Nativist_Riots
Along with frontier America’s very mainstream WASPS of course, Joseph Smith would have been acquainted with a few local Shakers and other peculiar or aberrant Christian Protestants, but they were even less influential on a young man in the American wilderness than the Roman Catholics, because it turns out that in the Shaker example for instance, expecting members to willfully not reproduce or engage in any of the related fun activity both diminishes any recruit’s motivation to join the group, but ultimately thwarts expansion and continuation of the movement.
There were also Quakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker and Mennonites and Amish and a whole host of
the odder sort of buttonless, funny-hat-wearing, primitive, Fundamentalist-Puritanical-Protestants floating over to early American and developing their clannish infestations in the US. These however, were mostly non-English immigrants and practitioners of closed or tight communal orders, often speaking German or some other foreign tongue. Especially in those days, plain, dumb, white, English-speaking Americans would not be in any way attracted to these odder sects and would in fact be prone to ridicule and persecute them. This worked out well for the Amish and so forth, because frankly, they didn‘t want anything to do with the “English” as they still call anyone other than themselves.
The Quakers or “Religious Society of Friends” unlike some of the other peculiar Reformation era spawns, spoke English and came out of a British Isle experience alright, but they were already condemned as heretics on numerous scores on both sides of the Atlantic. Most offensive to the American Puritans was the claim that man could talk to Jesus Christ directly without benefit of any clergy at all. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, Friends were outlawed 
entirely and subject to immediate execution on sight. Several Quakers (Mary Dyer) were hanged on Boston Common for publicly preaching. In England, Friends were excluded by law from sitting in Parliament from 1698 to 1833.
The Baptists, descendants of the English and European Anabaptists who were universally despised by Roman Catholic and Protestant alike on both sides of the pond only two generations previously, had by Joseph Smith’s time gone almost mainstream. It had helped the Baptists to be separated from both the Inquisition and the Reformation, both of which found reasons to object to Anabaptist theology. But in New England, they were still battling lingering suspicion and condemnation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptists
The snake-handlers, the glossalalliacs—tongue-speakers–the whole Charismatic Movement had almost kicked off in Smith’s time, making the Baptists’ Old World controversy of infant baptism-verses-Believer’s Baptism hardly exciting at all. As for the Charismatics; these fledgling evangelicals got shunned into obscurity and were consider
ed freaks for the most part by the fervent and demanding New England conservative clergies who dominated Smith’s local scene.
Joseph admittedly experimented with “folk magic” or what became known as “Spiritualism.” Rather a lot of the Christians Smith fellowshipped with were into “divination” and other “spiritual gifts.” Though this benign activity translated into a history of detractors characterizing him as a “money digger” or “spook hunter” of some sort, had Smith been born a century later, his notions of prophesy and the “Full Gospel” gifts returning to earth would have by then become downright common. As for “money digging,” this charge was a major hobby in Smith’s day, as every American believed the place was littered with ancient Indian gold and pirate treasure—the only issue at hand was the method of sensing where it was buried.
Prophecy in and of itself as a concept, 
actually became a big business in Christian circles a century after the founding of Mormonism–Smith was just a bit premature in this effort. Today you can turn on the radio or television at any given moment and hear fully-accredited Christian televangelists refer to themselves as “prophets of God” and talk at great length about their “visions” and “revelations.” One famous such proclamation came from the master evangelist Oral Roberts back http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/rating_the_dead_televangelists/ in 1987 during the height of the televangelist era, when he prophesied that Jesus was going to call him home if he didn’t get eight million dollars to save his City of Faith complex in Tulsa Oklahoma, which was hemorrhaging cash to the tune of ten million dollars and more a year. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964970,00.html Roberts had proven this strategy already in a previous vision in 1980 connected with raising funds for the Christian medical tower around which his 
City of Faith development was centered. This previous vision featured the image of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus Christ
towering over the completed skyscraper of his hospital–which is now CityPlex Towers and mostly office space, since the project immediately went belly-up after its centerpiece was finished. So far there are no mobs led by ordained Christian ministers burning Christian “prophets” like Oral Roberts out of their homes, raping their women, pillaging their villages, and seizing the property they are fo
rced to flee or die. Unlike their contemporaries in Joseph Smith’s day, Christian ministers have been most forgiving of their overtly sinful behavior. Most of thes
e fallen tele-prophets went right back into business after a year or so of public self-flagellation and a lot of open weeping. There’s a reason for this. Christians believe that Christ died for every sin you have ever committed, every sin you are now committing, and every sin you will commit. If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior you are just flat out saved period no doubt no contingencies. You have been, are now, and always will be forgiven. And we’re all sinners anyway. Sin is sin big or small it’s all the same. Forgiveness is free. Heaven is heaven, and all Christians get there in the end. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t seem right does it? It’s God’s will though. It’s a mystery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker
http://www.rickross.com/reference/tbn/tbn19.html
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/char/more/hist.htm
http://www.epk.com/entertainment/jessica-hahn-hit-on-larry-king/
http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/religion/stories/DN-tilton_28met.ART.State.Edition2.50eb9da.htmlMy Lutheran relatives however would correct; God may forgive you, but the congregation never will. I mean this literally, because archetypal Faith Healer Oral Roberts blitzed through the family homestead in North Dakota on one of his early revival tours and “healed” a relative who had a heart condition that required him to keep nitroglycerine pills handy when he had an incident. Roberts told him to trust Jesus and throw away the pills. That worked for quite a while. Oral Roberts was long gone with all his loot of course, when my kinsman had another fit, dropped nearly dead to the floor, and as he lay there struggling, everyone realized the pills that would have brought him out of it in a few minutes were also long gone.
Uncle Oscar should have had more faith I suppose. That must be his fault then.
A lot of effort has been put into revising Joseph Smith’s pretty orthodox childhood Christian credentials into some sort of hillbilly occultic humbuggery. This is to be expected from his critics, who believe Mo
rmonism is Satan’s own Church. The thing to remember however is, they believe everyone’s church other than their own is going to send you to the devil as well. You don’t have to see angels or talk to God or be a false prophet to burn in hell as a non-Christian. Even John Calvin, who invented most of modern American Protestantism found that out when he was hauled into a heresy trial at the start of his religious career for merely being imprecise in his Trinitarian language. http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2009/s09060184.htm The truth is, when Joseph Smith went seeking answers in the Bible, he went seeking answers about mainstream, modern, institutionalized Protestant denominations and the problems he had with their doctrines. He wasn’t praying for help in digging up pirate gold. He wasn’t out in the woods asking for God’s divine plan to fund the first Christian amusement theme park. He wasn’t looking for a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus to bless his religious empire. He was trying to figure out what the Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists were all squabbling about amongst themselves. And when he studied his Bible, he studied it as one of them—he studied the Bible as a Christian.
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.
All Hail the Protestants Part 1: Martin Luther Kicks it Off
At this point in the Christian story Mormons may even know a little bit about the sort of Christianity that shaped and taught young Joseph Smith. With the advent of Protestantism in Christianity’s historical evolution, Mormons may think they know what prompted Joseph to go kneel down in the woods and ask God what his next move should be. They do know for sure, as part of core Mormon doctrine, he was trying to find his place amongst the wide array of third and fourth generation Protestants he grew up with in the weeds and woods of woolly Upstate New York, in the first decades of the 19th century. The truth of the matter however, is that the frontier American evangelists that Smith, his family and friends knew had little in common with the roots of either Protestantism or the Reformation Movement.
The first definitionally “Protestant” or “Reformation” movement in the Church of course was the Great Schism of 1054. http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/gschism.htm In this, the Eastern and Western Church excommunicated itself from itself. You may remember this had mostly to do with the Nicene Creed which had been in contention with the Eastern Church for hundreds of years by then. There were a number of other issues and the exact date that this schism became fixed and irrevocable is still debated. But in retrospect, it also had very much to do with the Western Church’s increased claims that the Roman Pope was the direct Apostolic heritage of Peter, and thus had primacy over all the other Popes, Priests, Holy Orders and of course, that meant the Eastern Bishops. The Eastern Bishops weren’t buying that argument in particular. When it came to a head they split Christianity formally into two clearly opposed and independent factions.
The first generation of what we now call actual Protestants were in fact just Roman Catholics with a personal bitch against the Pope, the Priesthood, and the various Orders and/or the government of the Holy Roman Church in general. Not one of them probably started out with a mind to leave, damage, or compete against the Roman Catholic Church at all. They wanted to “fix” it. Hundreds of years later it’s very romanticized and spiritualized, but I use the colloquial word “bitching” here, because it is in fact exactly what was going on: routine, common, street-level bitching. There was no deep or serious intent to revolt from the Holy Roman Empire. At the right place, at the right time, and with the right person however, a well-worded bitch session can change the world. The very first official “Protestant,” the igniter of the Reformation’s Big Bang, was Martin Luther, a German monk with 95 reasons the Church was going to hell in a handbasket.
Martin Luther was a German monk, ordained Roman Catholic priest and scholar born in 1483. He had a bright but sarcastic educational career in good schools and his wealthy and influential father shuffled him through a a great primary education in prestigious academies and encouraged him to get into law. His father, Hans Luder, (Anglicized later as Luther) made his fortune buying leases on copper mines and operated smelters. Coming from the lower classes, described in the day as “peasantry,” his father in particular was keen to place young Martin in the best and highest social and academic circles possible. He spared no expense in either Martin’s education or in wrangling the lad into social or religious positions to show off his genius. His father’s career plan had as its main objective gaining his son a high place in the civil service. His father served on four important regional civic councils and had a great deal of respect and influence locally.
Following his father’s advice, Luther first pursued juris prudence but found law dry and uninspiring. He is quoted as claiming the law represented only uncertainty. He drifted almost immediately into into philosophy and made many explanations in the record that what he wanted was assurances about the nature of life. He had a special interest in the thinking of Aristotle, again following something of a traditional Augustine-like attraction to Platonist mentalities. Unlike Augustine however, even from an early age Luther was a very religious youth, actually overly-pious and highly critical of the profane habits of his fellows at school, and the laziness and ungodliness of society in general. He described his college as a “beerhouse and a whorehouse.” he concluded that pure reason could only bring answers about man but the only way you could learn about God is through divine revelation and the Holy Scriptures.
Most Mormons naturally would find this to be a very familiar concept, but as I say, what Martin Luther was up to had very little to do with the religious environment or motivations Joseph Smith was most familiar with some three hundred years and more later. I’ll expand upon this when I deal with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, but for the moment I’ll say that Luther’s concept of “divine revelation” is rather different than that of the Mormon’s “personal revelation” or “revelation” in general, as was his attitude to the “Holy Scriptures.” For one thing, he didn’t think a lot of them were Holy. And apparently, divine revelation to Luther was whatever he’d decided the scripture should mean, even if he had to write it out clearly himself.
The story goes however, that Luther was riding a horse in the countryside one day in not very dubious weather, on his way back to his post at university, when a bolt of lighting came unexpectedly out of the sky and hit the ground almost right on top of him. (Perhaps this is the origin of the expression, “It came to me like a bolt from the blue.”) In any case, he was so upset, he rushed to his father telling the story, and saying, “ Praise Saint Ann, I will become a Monk.” Luther apparently felt that if God or Nature or like itself could just come blazing to an end in an instant without a hit of warning like that, then he should dedicate every last second of it making sure he was getting into heaven and serving God, rather than other vain and mortal pursuits.
That of course is the Lutheran-to-neutralish Protestant version. If you want a study in revisionist history, or historical impressionism, first have a read from the official Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438b.htm Then read the same summary of Luther’s life in the Wikipedia or any other source you care to Google: http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/martin-luther.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm
The Catholics obviously included the entire scope of Lutheran detractors in their history of the, well, it’s beyond a schism, it’s a revolt. If you listen to the Roman Church, Luther was the son of a brutal, money-grubbing blue-collar hick with delusions of grandeur who beat the hell out of his little Martin trying to buy into the aristocracy. The child Martin fled this brutal home life into the monastery, not out of a call from God, but in a desperate attempt to get out of the house so his father couldn’t abuse the hell out of him any more. His mother, by Roman Catholic accounts, was a whore and a washerwoman—not being sure which was the worse epithet. The fact that he was excommunicated and told the Pope to take a hike was not surprising, since he was the product of a false-conversion and a rebel in the first place.
Frankly, I found so many contradictory sources on simple things like his days at school and other basic history I’m still not sure of the chain of events, but this is the best composite I could muster:
At the age of seventeen in 1501 Martin Luther apparently entered the University of Erfurt depending upon who you want to listen to. He received his Bachelor’s degree in philosophy 1502. Three years later, in 1505, he received a Master’s degree and enrolled in the law school of that university. He then dropped out after the thunderbolt incident (allegedly) and joined the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505.
Once in the monastic life however, nobody disputes the fact that our Martin threw himself into flagellations and fastings, pilgrimages and the whole gamut of extreme dedication to the Augustinian order he had joined. In the Lutheran version he just could not do enough to feel close to God. In the first generation of Roman Catholic detractors’ version, it appears that it was at the library there at the Erfurt monastery that he first ran into a copy of the Bible. Subsequent Roman Catholic versions say this is silly, and later generations of Roman Catholic detractors have admitted that he wrote extensively throughout his life about Biblical matters and obviously was familiar with the Bible from his youth.
Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s Superior in the monastery, decided that Martin was spending too much time in his struggles over some grand universal revelation about life, the universe and everything. He encouraged Martin to continue his academic career and lay off the self-inflicted punishment a while. In 1507 Luther was ordained to the priesthood. In 1508 he began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies on 9 March 1508. He also completed a Bachelor’s degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard which was the fundamental textbook of theology in the Middle Ages, in 1509. On 19 October 1512, the University of Wittenberg accredited Martin Luther the degree of Doctor of Theology.
Luther soon became a world-renowned lecturer and scholars and theologians came to hear his explorations of Church doctrines and Biblical principles. Then he became more and more pointed in his criticisms of the way the Church was being administered and a thing called “indulgences” in particular, which were basically bribes to the Church keep God from sending you to hell for your sins. The Vatican needed a lot of money for expanding its empire, and it reaped most of its expenses for building monuments, basilicas, chapels and cathedrals like St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, from essentially granting the nobles of Germany, who had tons of cash in the day, a forgiveness of any sins they felt like committing for a suitable donation to the cause.
On Halloween of 1517, Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. 
These were basically complaints against the Pope and Church in general that Luther claimed violated Biblical injuncture. Protestants often point to this event as the start of the Protestant revolution. however, John Wycliffe, John Hus, Thomas Linacre, John Colet, and others had already made similar complaints against the Roman Church without getting any attention from the Pope. Luther made specific charges of the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican priest, and he further made allegations damning the position of the clergy in regard to it’s role in determining individual salvation in general.
In part due to the invention of the printing press, Luther’s 95 thesis were published almost overnight all over Europe. His bill of complaint came along at a time where not only was regional public acclaim ready for a reasoned argument against the Holy Roman Empire, but all of Europe and England were struggling with the subject of the Roman Pope and his puppet Emperors. Technology of the day suddenly allowed Luther’s well-crafted attack to be duplicated and transmitted worldwide. Though he never apparently intended it, his 95 theses, and eventually all of his writings became legendary in the Protestant movement.
Luther’s observations were condemned as heretical by Pope Leo X in the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520. He was give 60 days to recant his 95 theses, and defend his writings. He was given another 60 days to confirm his public recantations to Rome. Luther was soon informed that the Pope had gathered all his writings and publicly burned them in Rome as heretical works. Luther responded by publicly burning his issued copy of Exsurge Domine.
On January 3, 1521 the Vatican published the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem ([It] Befits [the] Roman Pontiff), excommunicating Martin Luther. It was customary after this step, to turn the heretic over to civil authorities to be burned or beheaded or hanged depending on how pissed off the Pope was with them.
Consequently Luther was summoned to either renounce or reaffirm his views, at the Diet of Worms on 17 April 1521. When he appeared before the assembly, Johann Von Eck, by then assistant to the Archbishop of Trier, acted as spokesman for Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth. He presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if he still believed what these works taught. Luther requested time to think about his answer. Granted an extension, Luther prayed, consulted with friends and mediators and presented himself before the Diet the next day.
When the counselor put the same question to Luther the next day, the reformer apologized for the harsh tone of many of his writings, but said that he could not reject the majority of them or the teachings in them. Luther respectfully but boldly stated, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.“
On May 25, 1521, the Emperor declared Martin Luther an outlaw. This in those days meant among other things, he was without protection of the law and anyone could kill him without legal retribution. As precarious a decree as this was, the usual course of the Holy Roman Empire would have been to torture a confession out of him and light him on fire. Or more often, produce a surprise set of new witnesses against the accused, like the say-so of a couple of paid whores or Church lackeys who only had to testify that they saw him having sexual intercourse with a goat or calling upon the name of Satan after stubbing his toe.
Luther had powerful friends however, one of whom was Fredrick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, his own prince. Frederick kidnapped him as he left the Diet and kept him about a year in Wartburg Castle. Luther grew a huge beard and dressed like a knight and called himself “Jorg.” He wandered around town and listened to common German dialects, which he used to continue his work translating the Bible from Greek and Latin sources into common German. He also not-so-secretly kept in touch with other Church rebels and Reformers by visitation and correspondence.
Martin Luther published the first Bible in his nation’s most common tongue in 1534. He used mostly a Greek Bible, a recent 1516 edition of Erasmus, later called Textus Receptus for the New Testament he published in 1522, followed by the Old Testament in 1534, which completed Biblical canon. In many prefaces to the Biblical books he openly debated and sometimes berated the validity for even including them, and placed several of the ones he disliked out of their usual order in an appendix in the back–Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. Then he deliberately left them out of the index. He dropped entirely Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, all of which were central and universally kept parts of the “Apocrypha.” He edited out parts of Esther and parts of Daniel which were longtime Old Testament canon in both Jewish and Christian tradition.
In the process of publishing his Bible, he was amalgamating into a common, mutually familiar language all of the many mutually undecipherable dialects he found in the streets, cities, villages and farms in what is now most of modern Germany. Martin Luther essentially invented the modern German language and taught it to a linguistically confused nation through the media miracle of Gutenberg’s new printing press.
The German humanist Johann Cochlaeus notes:
Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.”[19]
Luther seems also to have given William Tyndale, an English Reformer and Biblical publisher/translator, safe haven and assistance in translating the same Greek-Latin sources for Tyndale’s English Bible. Tyndale’s New Testament of 1522 was a chief source for the King James Version of the New Testament roughly a hundred years later.
Martin escaped martyrdom and lived peacefully to a ripe old age in the same small German town he was born in. In this time he wrote a little about everything. Some of these works now are claimed to be written by friends and students and a whole conspiratorial Protestant Movement full of mythical geniuses he associated with who borrowed his name or authority. But some of the things accurately attributed to Luther by his detractors I find refreshingly common, like urging his followers to, “Tell the Devil he may kiss my ass.” I find an earthy honesty of spirit in it. Luther was a sage of the middle-ages who loved his beer and spoke his mind. Queen Victoria’s bland, sterile, simpering virginity hadn’t yet infected the Church.
There is such a thing as too much honesty when it comes to Luther’s attitude toward Jews however. Later in his career Martin Luther took rather a nasty anti-Semitic turn and started hammering away against the Jews, which he referred to as “That accursed race.” Originally he was quite tolerant of them, thinking they simply hadn’t heard the gospel and thus had no chance to accept its truth. After many years of his overtures to the Jews, and these efforts producing little interest in mass conversions to Christ, he began to preach that the Jews were eternally damned and set in their own evil, anti-Christian ways. He made moves to expel them from German politics entirely. He wrote a treatise entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies, and often quoted Christ in Matthew 12:34, where Jesus called them “a brood of vipers and children of the devil.” There was a little socio-political intrigue there in Luther’s motivations as well, since in Luther’s day Church Law superseded civil law, and the Jews were exempt in this arrangement from Church laws against usury, and could charge whatever interest they liked in making loans and other business arrangements. Luther in many ways conditioned the German public for the acceptance of Adolph Hitler’s similar theories against the Jews, and fed a longstanding resentment that found the nation very accommodating of Hitler’s “Final Solution” by suggesting they were all sneaky, unprincipled heathens out to steal the wealth of the nation and sabotage the happiness of good Christians all.
Martin wrote and preached at one point that his followers should, “…burn down Jewish schools and synagogues, and to throw pitch and sulphur into the flames; to destroy their homes; to confiscate their ready money in gold and silver; to take from them their sacred books, even the whole Bible; and if that did not help matters, to hunt them of the country like mad dogs.” (Luther’s Works, vol. Xx, pp. 2230-2632 as quoted in Stoddard JL. Rebuilding a Lost Faith, 1922, p.99.)
But Luther’s crazy anti-Semitic streak wasn’t his only gap in enlightened Christian thought. I’ve made references to Luther’s problems with the “approved” Biblical canon of his day a number of times. Here again are just a few of the disparaging comments he’s on record as having made about the Bible:
Regarding the New Testament Book of Hebrews: It need not surprise one to find here bits of wood, hay, and straw (O’HarePF. The Facts About Luther, 1916–1987 reprint ed., p. 203.)
The Epistle of James: “St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle” (Luther, M. Preface to the New Testament, 1546.)
The Book of the St. John the Revelator: “About this book of the Revelation of John…I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic…I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly-indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important-and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep…My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it” (Luther, M. Preface to the Revelation of St. John, 1522).
Martin Luther on the Old Testament:
“Job spoke not as it stands written in his book, but only had such thoughts. It is merely the argument of a fable. It is probable that Solomon wrote and made this book.”
“Ecclesiastes ought to have been more complete. There is too much incoherent matter in it…Solomon did not, therefore, write this book.”
“The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much…”
“The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible.” (as quoted in O’Hare, p. 202.)
Of the first five books of Moses: “We have no wish either to see or hear Moses” (Ibid, p. 202.)
In his most famous dispute translating his German Bible, he responds to critics who claim he’s inserting his own personal religious doctrine into his translation, particularly Romans 3:28 where he adds to the writer’s assertion that we are “saved by grace,” the word “alone,” making the reading, “saved by grace alone.”
You tell me what a great fuss the Papists are making because the word alone is not in the text of Paul…say right out to him: ‘Dr. Martin Luther will have it so,’…I will have it so, and I order it to be so, and my will is reason enough. I know very well that the word ‘alone’ is not in the Latin or the Greek text (Stoddard J. Rebuilding a Lost Faith. 1922, pp. 101-102; see also Luther M. Amic. Discussion, 1, 127.)
While this quote is used by his enemies to suggest he considered himself above the original writers, he also replied in other sources:
The text itself and the meaning of St. Paul urgently require and demand it. For in that very passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law . . . But when works are so completely cut away — and that must mean that faith alone justifies — whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this cutting away of works will have to say, ‘Faith alone justifies us, and not works’.” [121]
In a sense, Joseph Smith’s “Inspired Version” wasn’t doing anything that Martin Luther hadn’t already done in his German translation of the Bible. 
Luther’s saga contains “Road to Damascus” incidents above and beyond the fabled lightning strike that sent him to the monastery and changed not only his Christian walk, but the entire Christian world. One such insight struck him while climbing a mountain and led him to give up his monastic life instantly when he finally realized self-induced misery was just a waste of his time and piety. Another came when he stopped dreading the “gospel” or “good news” as some sort of inevitable come-uppance with the Lord and realized it was really a promise of unconditional forgiveness and he could stop beating and fasting and stone-bedding himself into penance. There’s also a great story in there about smuggling nuns out of a convent in herring barrels and marrying one. All this makes good reading for the Lutheran or anyone else, but is irrelevant for Mormon study purposes.
According to the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia, Luther’s main theological contentions were thus:
If you’re the Roman Pope or any other authority in the Holy Roman Empire, some of these issues are a real threat to the established order—like directly discarding not just the entire structure of any Church at all, but throwing the priesthood call freely out to the unwashed masses. The bulk of his other contentions are just rehashes of theological battles Augustine fought over a thousand years earlier. The issue of indulgences, even the Pope knew were wrong. They were just profitable and necessary for the temporal advancement of a comfortable Papal clubhouse and the armies of labor, craftsmen, and soldiery to maintain it. Luther however, went through a number of phases theologically and organizationally before he died, and in fact never totally got a church or full litany of dogma organized. Originally, yes, he thought the common body of Christ could just elect its own priests, discern its own truths and run its own Church. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before a little disaster called the “Peasant War,” got him re-thinking this whole concept.
Initially, Luther seemed to many to support the peasants, condemning the oppressive practices of the nobility that had incited many of the peasants. As the war continued, and especially as atrocities at the hands of the peasants increased, Luther came out forcefully against the revolt; since Luther relied on support and protection from the princes, he was afraid of alienating them. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525), he encouraged the nobility to visit swift and bloody punishment upon the peasants. Many of the revolutionaries considered Luther’s words a betrayal. Others withdrew once they realized that there was neither support from the Church nor from its main opponent. The war in Germany ended in 1525, when rebel forces were put down by the armies of the Swabian League.
Luther resented Germany’s domination by a group of clergymen based in Rome, and these nationalist feelings may have motivated the Reformation to some extent. During the Peasants’ War, Luther continued to stress obedience to secular authority; many may have interpreted this doctrine as endorsement of absolute rulers, leading to acceptance of monarchs and dictators in German history. http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm
The Peasant War also gave birth to the appearance of three “prophets,” and a number of other hyper-Reformationists that went well beyond anything Luther had in mind. Luther had opened a Pandora’s box of individual, charismatic Christian rebellion. Luther subsequently fell back on a more conventional Church structure with an elite, institutionally educated clergy who ran the show and lost most of his faith in the greater body of Christ to govern itself.
Zwickau prophets and the Peasants’ War
Main articles: Thomas Müntzer, Zwickau prophets, and Peasants’ War
On December 27, 1521, three “prophets”, influenced by and in turn influencing Thomas Müntzer, appeared in Wittenberg from Zwickau: Thomas Dreschel, Nicolas Storch and Mark Thomas Stübner. The crisis came in the Peasants’ War in southern Germany in 1525. In its origin a revolt against feudal oppression, it became, under the leadership of Müntzer, a war against all constituted authorities, and an attempt to establish by revolution an ideal Christian commonwealth, with absolute equality and the community of goods. There were some common points between the Zwickau prophets and the later-developed Anabaptists.
Münster Rebellion
Main articles: Münster Rebellion and Münster
A second and more determined attempt to establish a theocracy was made at Münster in Westphalia (1532–5), led by Bernhard Rothmann, Bernhard Knipperdolling, Jan Matthys and John of Leiden.
All things considered, Lutheranism, of all the Reformationist ideas had the most reasonable and measured spread into its country of origin. Not too surprisingly however, each of the various Reforming countries who followed his example, found its own heroes and its own doctrinal basis for Reformation, and went eagerly about persecuting, even civilly arresting and institutionally trying and slaughtering anyone who preached a different gospel, whether it be a Roman Catholic gospel or any of the competing “Reformed” gospels. Luther carried on some wild debates with a Swiss Reformer named Zwingli for example, about whether or not the Host actually was the flesh and blood of Christ. Though neither Luther nor Zwingli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwingli would have been inclined to set one-another on fire, hang, or chop off each other’s heads, the fact remains that had one or both of them tried to carry on the same debates a few years later in front of major Reformationist and prime Protestant, Jean Calvin’s Geneva religious empire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin they’d have been bound in chains, had their books piled upon them and they’d have been lit up in the public square. Clearly, one of the main features of historical Christianity, the oppressing and killing off its rivals, dissenters, and free-thinkers, was not a feature of the Church being “Reformed” in the Reformation. It was just being passed on to a new set of Inquisitors.
In the end, Luther ended up with a professional clergy running a highly organized, institutional church, and this apparatus was entirely supported by the general congregation. Luther’s new church is still claiming to be “One Church, Catholic and Apostolic.” The big difference in Luther’s Lutheranism compared to the Roman Catholicism he’d left was that the congregation got to vote on who they were going to pay to tell them what to believe.
Modern Lutheranism is too broad a subject to be of interest to me in this context, nor could I or anyone else fully cover the insanely diverse directions it has gone in all of these centuries. In the American Lutheran variants alone we just achieved yet another split over whether actively Gay ministers can be ordained. Previous splits occurred over whether women pastors can be ordained. Splits have taken place over the issue of the inerrancy of the Holy Bible, and the Missouri Synod claims the modern King James Bible to be inerrant in spite of Martin Luther’s serious condemnation of major parts of it. Other synods use a wide number of other Bibles that have little in common with Martin Luther’s work as well and insist the Bible has to be read in social context and contains a high portion of symbolic and allegorical content.
You can send homosexuals to hell and shut the mouths of your women in God’s house, or you can ordain all of the above to be your ministers, and still call yourself a “Lutheran.” Or you can take the middle road, and ordain confessed Gay ministers who aren’t sexually active, or let women and Gay’s do everything else but minister, perhaps become lay ministers. The Bible can be inerrant and fixed four hundred years ago by King James of England, or five hundred years ago by Luther of Germany, or it can be a groovy paraphrase published when hippies and Jesus-Freaks roamed the campi of America in tie-dyed T Shirts and faded bellbottoms. Stern old Pastor Wilhelm will send teenage girls to hell for wearing lipstick and going to the school dance, and Pastor Shirley T. Ransexual will tell them that Jesus loves the sinner, and invite them back to the rectory to play Black Sabbath and drink really thin coffee, along with Pastor Bob, the young hip youth pastor just out of divinity school who always wears a big hood-ornament-looking crucifix medallion and turtleneck instead of his vestments. It all comes down to a vote and a list of by-laws when you’re a Lutheran. And yes, I’ve been there and done that.
