Posts Tagged ‘missionary’
Mormon Doctrine Part 2: The “R” is for “Rant”
The convoluted process for determining Mormon doctrine on this or that score today, is nowhere near as
simple and direct as showing up at Newell Whitney’s store, buying a plug of chaw, a quart of whiskey, and going upstairs to the School of Prophets to ask Joseph Smith. Indeed, the “process” of determining Mormon doctrine currently isn’t even a “process.” It just sort of happens. “Mormon” doctrine mutates daily and continues to just slop out of the pulpits and quorums and other organizations in the church, extrapolated from raw journals and personal, pet writings of Mormon authorities over the years.
A good example of some of these sorts of apocryphal sources is the a decades-after-the-fact interview with Zebedee Coltrin about his attendance in the previously mentioned School of the Prophets that originally met above Whtiney’s store. And while helpful on one level, Zebedee could pretty much say anything he wanted to about what was taught or performed there and assign any doctrine or practice to anyone he felt like. But whether coming from Zebedee Coltrin or Brigham Young, this is the sort of informational source the LDS church has relied upon for its “doctrine” since Joseph Smith was assassinated. And it’s not a good thing.
http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/ZebC.html
Don’t take my word for it. Bruce R “McConcrete,” the late apostle who wrote in stone, will make the case for me:
The following is a letter written by LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie and sent to a BYU Professor by the name of Eugene England. The purpose of McConkie’s letter was to let Dr. England know that he was very displeased with certain ideas he was espousing publicly. These included teachings taught in the past by leaders such as Brigham Young….
The letter itself is quite lengthy so I have condensed it. It deals with a number of LDS “doctrines” and doctrinal camps that Brother England was attempting to reconcile through the examination of the historical teachings primarily of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. The “King Follet Discourse,” is one of Joseph Smith’s most popular apocryphal writings, and is at the center of England’s postulations:
THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
The Council of Twelve
47 East South Temple Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84150
February 19, 1981Mr. Eugene England
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxxxDear Brother England:
This may well be the most important letter you have or will receive. It is written in reply to an undated letter from you which came in an envelope postmarked, September 4, 1980. Your letter enclosed a 19-page document which you had prepared under the title, “The Perfection and Progression of God: Two Spheres of Existence and Two Modes of Discourse.”
In your letter and the article enclosed with it, you set forth the thesis that although God knows all things as pertaining to our sphere of existence, there are nonetheless other spheres beyond ours in which Deity continues to advance and progress in knowledge and truth. In espousing and explaining this philosophy you suppose you are harmonizing quotations from various of the early Brethren. Some of these statements emphatically say that God knows all things and has all power and others of them say that he is advancing in knowledge and understanding and is gaining new truths.
…
On Sunday, June 1, 1980, I spoke at one of the multi-stake firesides in the Marriott Center on the subject, “The Seven Deadly Heresies.” In that talk I said:
“There are those who say that God is progressing in knowledge and is learning new truths.
“This is false — utterly, totally, and completely. There is not one sliver of truth in it. It grows out of a wholly twisted and incorrect view of the King Follet Sermon and of what is meant by eternal progression.
…
“Eternal progression consists of living the kind of life God lives and of increasing in kingdoms and dominions everlastingly. Why anyone should suppose that an infinite and eternal being, who has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years, who made the sidereal heavens, whose creations are more numerous than the particles of the earth, and who is aware of the fall of every sparrow — why anyone would suppose that such a being has more to learn and new truths to discover in the laboratories of eternity is totally beyond my comprehension.
…
He [Brigham Young] was guided by the Holy Spirit in his teachings in general. He was a mighty prophet. He led Israel the way the Lord wanted his people led. He built on the foundation laid by the Prophet Joseph. He completed his work and has come on to eternal exaltation.
Nonetheless, as Joseph Smith so pointedly taught, a prophet is not always a prophet, only when he is acting as such. Prophets are men and they make mistakes. Sometimes they err in doctrine. This is one of the reasons the Lord has given us the Standard Works. They become the standards and rules that govern where doctrine and philosophy are concerned. If this were not so, we would believe one thing when one man was president of the Church and another thing in the days of his successors. Truth is eternal and does not vary. Sometimes even wise and good men fall short in the accurate presentation of what is truth. Sometimes a prophet gives personal views which are not endorsed and approved by the Lord.
Yes, President Young did teach that Adam was the father of our spirits, and all the related things that the cultists ascribe to him. This, however, is not true. He expressed views that are out of harmony with the gospel. But, be it known, Brigham Young also taught accurately and correctly, the status and position of Adam in the eternal scheme of things. What I am saying is that Brigham Young, contradicted Brigham Young, and the issue becomes one of which Brigham Young we will believe. The answer is we will believe the expressions that accord with the teachings in the Standard Works.
Yes, Brigham Young did say some things about God progressing in knowledge and understanding, but again, be it known, that Brigham Young taught, emphatically and plainly, that God knows all things and has all power meaning in the infinite, eternal and ultimate and absolute sense of the word. Again, the issue is, which Brigham Young shall we believe and the answer is: We will take the one whose statements accord with what God has revealed in the Standard Works.
I think you can give me credit for having a knowledge of the quotations from Brigham Young relative to Adam, and of knowing what he taught under the subject that has become known as the Adam God Theory. President Joseph Fielding Smith said that Brigham Young will have to make his own explanations on the points there involved. I think you can also give me credit for knowing what Brigham Young said about God progressing. And again, that is something he will have to account for. As for me and my house, we will have the good sense to choose between the divergent teachings of the same man and come up with those that accord with what God has set forth in his eternal plan of salvation.
This puts me in mind of Paul’s statement: “There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” (1 Cor. 11:19.) I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality. We will be judged by what we believe among other things. If we believe false doctrine, we will be condemned. If that belief is on basic and fundamental things, it will lead us astray and we will lose our souls. This is why Nephi said: “And all those who preach false doctrines, . . . wo, wo, wo be unto them, saith the Lord God Almighty, for they shall be thrust down to hell!: (2 Ne. 28:15.) This clearly means that people who teach false doctrine in the fundamental and basic things will lose their souls. The nature and kind of being that God is, is one of these fundamentals. I repeat: Brigham Young erred in some of his statements on the nature and kind of being that God is and as to the position of Adam in the plan of salvation, but Brigham Young also taught the truth in these fields on other occasions. And I repeat, that in his instance, he was a great prophet and has gone on to eternal reward. What he did is not a pattern for any of us. If we choose to believe and teach the false portions of his doctrines, we are making an election that will damn us.
It should be perfectly evident that under our system of church discipline, it would be anticipated that some others besides Brigham Young would pick up some of his statements and echo them. Those who did this, also on other occasions, taught accurately and properly what the true doctrines of the gospel are. I do not get concerned when a good and sound person who. On the over-all, is teaching the truth happens to err on a particular point and say something in conflict with what he has said himself on a previous occasion. We are all mortal. We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. No single individual all the time is in tune with the Holy Spirit, but I do get concerned when some person or group picks out false statements and makes them the basis of their presentation and theology and thus ends up having a false concept of the doctrine, which in reality, was not in the mind of the person whose quotations they are using.
Wise gospel students do not build their philosophies of life on quotations of individuals, even though those quotations come from presidents of the Church. Wise people anchor their doctrine on the Standard Works. When Section 20 says that God is infinite and eternal, it means just that and so on through all of the revelations. There is no need to attempt to harmonize conflicting views when some of the views are out of harmony with the Standard Works. This is what life is all about. The Lord is finding out what we will believe in spite of the allurements of the world or the philosophies of men or the seemingly rational and logical explanations that astute people make.
We do not solve our problems by getting a statement from the president of the Church or from someone else on a subject. We have been introduced to the gospel; we have the gift of the Holy Ghost; we have the Standards Works and it is our responsibility to get in tune and understand properly what the Lord has revealed and has had us canonize. The end result of this course of personally and individually pursuing light and truth is to reach that millennial state of which the scriptures say it will no longer be necessary for every man to say to his neighbor “know the Lord,” for all shall know him from the greatest to the least. Joseph Smith says this will be by the spirit of revelation.
…It is not in your province to set in order the Church or to determine what is doctrines shall be. It is axiomatic among us to know that God has given apostles and prophets “for the edifying of the body of Christ,” and that their ministry is to see that “we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Eph. 4:11-16.) This means, among other things, that it is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent. You do not have a divine commission to correct me or any of the Brethren. The Lord does not operate that way. If I lead the Church astray, that is my responsibility, but the fact still remains that I am the one appointed with all the rest involved so to do. The appointment is not given to the faculty at Brigham Young University or to any of the members of the Church. The Lord’s house is a house of order and those who hold the keys are appointed to proclaim the doctrines.
Now you know that this does not mean that individuals should not do research and make discoveries and write articles. What it does mean is that what they write should be faith promoting and where doctrines are concerned, should be in harmony with that which comes from the head of the Church. And those at the head of the Church have the obligation to teach that which is in harmony with the Standard Works. If they err then be silent on the point and leave the event in the hands of the Lord. Some day all of us will stand before the judgment bar and be accountable for our teachings. And where there have been disagreements the Lord will judge between us. In the meantime if we want to save our own souls we need to strive with all the power we have to be in harmony with the revelations and not to be teaching or promulgating doctrines that suit our fancy.
I advise you to take my counsel on the matters here involved. If I err, that is my problem; but in your case if you single out some of these things and make them the center of your philosophy, and end up being wrong, you will lose your soul. One of the side effects of preaching contrary to what the Brethren preach is to get a spirit of rebellion growing up in your heart. This sort of thing cankers the soul spiritually. It drives people out of the Church. It weakens their faith. All of us need all of the faith and strength and spiritual stability we can get to maintain our positions in the Church and to work out our salvation.
Now, I think I have said enough in this letter so that if you are receptive and pliable, you will get the message. If you are not, rebellion will well up in your heart. I pray for your well-being. I repeat: the door to my office is open. Perhaps I should tell you what one of the very astute and alert General Authorities said to me when I chanced to mention to him the subject of your letter to me. He said: “Oh dear, haven’t we rescued him enough times already.”
Now I hope you will ponder and pray and come to a basic understanding of fundamental things and that unless and until you can on all points, you will remain silent on those where differences exist between you and the Brethren. This is the course of safety. I advise you to pursue it. If you do not, perils lie ahead. It is not too often in this day that any of us are told plainly and bluntly what ought to be. I am taking the liberty of so speaking to you at this time, and become thus a witness against you if you do not take the counsel.
I repeat: I have every good wish for you, pray that the Lord will bless you and hope that things will work out properly and well in your life.
Sincerely,
Bruce R. McConkie
BRM:vh
P.S. I am taking the liberty of sending copies of this response to those to whom you sent your communication.
It turns out Bruce R
McConkie is more cynical than I have ever been. And I grew up believing him to be the most obnoxiously pious of the pious. The most nose-rubbingly enlightened of the enlightened. I will also tell you that Brother McConkie was so enthusiastic about his unique calling in this matter that he mailed out so many copies that they instantly became common currency in anti-Mormon camps. What actually came of this screed is nothing but fodder for anti-Mormonism. In terms of its doctrinal merits, It vanished into a very quiet oblivion. It went to the same theological wastebasket that his Seven Deadly Heresies talk went to—except of course this too became great fodder for the anti-Mormon efforts around the globe, because in that little jewel of a discourse, he said things like, having a personal relationship with Christ is heretical. You’d think the “greatest theologian of our times” would have the discernment to see how raving, anti-Christian sound-bites could be used against us, wouldn’t you?
Then again, McConkie has also been on the other end of the theological power structure. Bruce R knows well how it feels on the other side of the lecture about following what the Brethren want taught:
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
47 E. South Temple Street
Salt Lake City, UtahDavid O. McKay, President
February 3, 1959Dr. A. Kent Christensen
Department of Anatomy
Cornell University Medical College
1300 York Avenue
New York 21, New YorkDear Brother Christensen:
I have your letter of January 23, 1959 in which you ask for a statement of the Church’s position on the subject of evolution.
The Church has issued not official statement on the subject of the theory of evolution.
Neither ‘Man, His Origin and Destiny’ by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, nor ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie, is an official publication of the Church. . . .[Emphasis added]
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
In the context of his own censure and the Brethren’s repeated disavowment of his most popular book, McConkie’s letter to England is truly an amazing document. Imagine the sheer ego it would take to just casually quote yourself from a talk you gave recently rather than type out a new paragraph like a mere mortal having a normal conversation. But that’s the psychological profile of an academic. If it’s published, it’s authoritative. Even if you’re publishing yourself it’s still authoritative.
Here also, is Bruce R McConkie as the pot calling the kettle black. He says to teach what the “Brethren” teach. That takes a lot of hutzpah from a guy who’s own seminal work, Mormon Doctrine, got him spanked and spanked hard by the “Brethren” for publishing unauthorized and offensive doctrinal errors from cover to cover. Then he has the gall to say Brigham Young taught false doctrine. Worse than that, to paraphrase David O McKay, McConkie’s whole tone and demeanor in Mormon Doctrine seemed deliberately designed to tell the entire orthodox Christian world to feck off. Frankly, that message still comes through loud and clear even after Brethren-enforced “corrections.”
Oddly enough, Brigham Young, who McConkie found guilty of teaching doctrine not approved by the “Brethren,” was the first “Brethren.” Brother Brigham is why we now just call them “The Brethren.” McConkie however, is the guy who made “The Brethren” sound like a mafia hit squad, who’d be talking to you later if you didn’t take his advice right now.
Apparently a live Bruce trumps a dead Brigham. And yes Bruce, if you’re reading along up there, the LDS church has in fact believed one thing under one president, and another thing under another president. Ironically, you yourself point out that Brigham Young taught that Adam was God as president of the church, and then say this is damnably false doctrine according to you and then current leadership.
David O McKay, another case in point, firmly stated that there was no doctrine at all demanding that negroes be denied the priesthood, that it was a policy matter that could be reversed. He even led a council of the combined quorums in 1969, and achieved an affirmative vote to do so, until Harold B Lee, out of town on business, came back and made such a stink that they had a losing re-vote, based upon his insistence that it was a canon doctrine matter that would require a revelation to change. Joseph Fielding Smith then succeeded McKay as president and further imposed this negro-anti-priesthood doctrine upon the church. Others, like McConkie, went on writing books and essays explaining in great detail the logic and reason of how negroes would never receive the priesthood in this lifetime. Smith died in 1972 and Harold B Lee sat in for a year succeeding Smith. He even more emphatically bolstered enforcement of the doctrine of the negro being denied priesthood authority, claiming it would not happen until some distant future eternity. Then he died in 1973, and under Spencer W Kimball a few years later, that promised, priesthood-bearing eternity arrived upon the Mormon negro rather suddenly. So suddenly, that McConkie had no defense for his vehement Mormon Doctrine commentaries paraphrasing Fielding Smith’s theology about it other than “I was wrong.”
The point is Bruce, you were merely parroting your father-in-law, a president of the church, and he was wrong. So was Harold B Lee, also a president of the church. So was Brigham Young on the matter. So was John Taylor, his successor, and I could name many more LDS presidents and “Prophets” who were wrong on the matter as it turns out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
McConkie says Brigham Young contradicted Brigham Young. Then he says a prophet is not always a prophet. He then quotes Joseph Smith debunking himself and half of what he ever said or wrote by implication. Then McConkie says (and even I shudder at this) that God allows even Brigham Young to teach false doctrine. God allows false doctrine to be taught in the church—even if from its president and Prophet.
See, good ol’ Bruce couldn’t just correct Gene England and let it lie. And McConkie doesn’t even think to question the reliability of the records which supply us with these crazy Brigham Young “doctrines,” the most obvious weak link. And then he really crosses the line into full hypocrisy: He doesn’t claim the “Brethren” to be infallible, just omnipotent.
If Brigham Young leads me to hell, argues McConkie, well, I guess I’m in hell but Brigham gets off because he’s a great prophet and did all those other good things that insures his reward anyway. I also presume that if Bruce R McConkie leads me to hell, I’m again the one stuck in hell, not The Conk. McConkie say it’s on his head for teaching me the false doctrine that sent me there, but what I guess that really means is that old Bruce will feel really bad about my plight as I eternally splash in the Lake of Fire, while he’s up there writing pompous letters on his Celestial letterhead to underlings in the lower Kingdoms of Glory.
The solution Bruce McConkie demands of you, is that you should not explore Brigham Young’s teachings, a man who saved the religion and was hand-picked by Joseph Smith to take over, but rather you should embrace the superior teaching and enlightenment of Bruce Redd McConkie instead. McConkie doesn’t make any promises though. He admits he might not be right either, but compared to Brigham Young, the odds of correctness improve greatly, he clearly implies. Still not much comfort in that Bruce.
Now, I called Bruce R McConkie a hypocrite back there a bit. I mean that in a very classical sense. McConkie in this letter to England, did just what he faulted Brigham Young for doing back in the day. He pulled a great big handful of doctrinal turds out of his arse just to make a point and win an argument. He used this arsenal of stinky theology just to fling poo at England for effect, acting like the King Monkey of the primate house at the zoo. McConkie was intellectually crafting talking points, not, divining rounded statements of universal truth.
And you see, when you check this little McConkie rant against Mormon canon as he suggests, he only condemns himself. Wilford Woodruff I think would disagree with the notion that God allows false doctrine to be taught by the LDS president. Woodruff seemed to think it wasn’t in the Lord’s mind, not in the Lord’s program to let the “Brethren” lead the church astray with false doctrine. And that’s canon. Bruce.
http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/1?lang=eng
Yes, the Twelve or other general authorities serve as a representative body who are authorized to call out the “Brethren” on false doctrine—whoever that “Brother” might be. That’s not necessarily all that mystical. Church government is inspired by God to do this job. The problem is, until recently it hasn’t been doing the job at all, it’s been doing the same schizophrenic waffling McConkie is doing, running for dogmatic cover between urging the faithful to continue lapping up every silly babble from the mouth of the current “Prophet,” telling the rank and file to shut up 
about any confusion or doctrinal uncertainty, while at the same time claiming the liberty to fight amongst themselves over just who’s twist on what doctrine is going to be binding for this next generation or so—but behind closed doors and very quietly.
Keep in mind now, that McConkie was not assigned to write this letter. It is sent on Council of Twelve letterhead and he makes an anonymous allusion to some other “general authority” he suggests he had discussed the matter with, but there is no official assignment here to do or say anything from the “Brethren.” And as McConkie points out himself, no single apostle has any inherent authority to define doctrine at all. Witness for Christ, yes, preach doctrine as defined by the First Presidency, yes, but apart from some special assignment not even the apostles are authorized to preach or doctrinally define anything they want. That would be Protestantism.
That Mormon apostles and general authorities have felt they are freely entitled to explore, ad-lib, publish, and promulgate their own doctrinal, literary and presentational works over the ages without permission, editorial input, or approval from the First Presidency is the problem. Bruce McConkie makes this clear in his letter to England, yet McConkie had this problem pointedly spelled out for him by the Brethren with his own first doctrinal effort, Mormon Doctrine, and McConkie pressed ahead anyway in direct defiance of the wishes of then president David O McKay. So, as I say, McConkie is a hypocrite of the first order in this matter.
The key to understanding Bruce R McConkie, is to know that he is merely the sum of all he’s read. He’s a consumer and regurgitator theologically, not a producer and refiner. Bruce R McConkie’s sole source of theological insight and authority was his ability to recall and vehemently quote a lot of things written by a lot of actual authorities scattered around in a lot of places. Naturally, he centers onto the canon, the standard Works. No problem there, except that he neglects to see that a huge chunk of these were delivered by Joseph Smith in modern times. I guess we’ll “prove” Joseph Smith’s uncanonized teachings by checking them against his canonical teachings. That’s the same way Bruce R footnotes Bruce R to prove Bruce R is correct.
McConkie’s main thesis is entirely sound. Essentially, the difference between Joseph Smith or Brigham Young telling fireside stories and Joseph Smith or Brigham Young speaking modern Holy Scripture, is a formal vote of the “Brethren” in the various quorums sanctioning some of his writings as canon, and others as unreliable. Full canonization naturally, would also require the sustaining vote of the general body of the church. But McConkie’s fallacious logic myopically ignores the fact that we use Biblical texts as canon as well. Joseph Smith himself said that these were not entirely reliable. Joseph Smith in fact started rewriting the whole Bible, because Joseph Smith thought the Bible was pretty messed up in some very important places.
God did not give us the Standard Works as McConkie pretends. A collection of “prophets” gave us the canon–every scrap of it. The “canon” we use has been authored, processed, edited, proven and finally sanctioned by the very “Brethren” McConkie claims are “allowed” by God to be flawed and false. They are therefore also freely entitled to falsely canonize their falseness.
Bruce R McConkie really wants to be a foaming fundamentalist. Bruce wants to be able to send you to hell if you don’t sign up. Bruce wants to send you to hell if you don’t swear an oath to the official dogma he’s 
appointed himself to define out of an inerrant canon like a Latter-day Calvin. He just doesn’t quite know how to get there from here so his connective logic is a bit silly.
Mormons do not believe the Bible to be inerrant. What hasn’t been dealt with clearly however, is whether or not any of the modern canon is inerrant. By implication you co go either way with the 
argument. It’s either been recorded by mortal, fallible man and subject to error, or it’s been controlled directly by the guiding hand of God, written, translated, and preserved by a string of Prophets, and therefore exactly the message God intended to deliver.
Likewise, McConkie in one breath declares the “Brethren” to be modern prophets, to be treated for all intents and purposes as inerrant, while in the next breath 
he censures Brigham Young, the second most sanctified Mormon Prophet in history, like he’s some hick preacher who showed up to the tabernacle drunk regularly, took the pulpit with no preparation whatsoever, and commenced to spout off any random old rubbish on his mind at the moment. (Probably too close to the truth there…)
McConkie would just love to play the Grand Inquisitor, but Mormonism isn’t dogmatically precise enough to give him the tools he needs to torture a confession out of you and set you on fire. And the fact is, he never got the job of Big Boss so he could actually authorize himself to do it.
Our poor Bruce in his day, was painfully twisted in his understanding of a number of basic LDS doctrinal concepts. He railed one day in a grand assembly at BYU, against Salvation by Grace Alone, and slapped around yet another BYU religion professor, and author of a book, who had the audacity to promote developing a “personal relationship with Christ.”
On occasion, his honesty caused him to use the bully pulpit to expose teachings—both within as
well as outside the church—with which he did not agree. One issue that caught my attention was his public rebuke of George Pace, an associate professor at BYU. Pace had been advocating that members should strive to have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” a popular theme in evangelical circles but anathema in Mormonism. In March 1982, McConkie gave a devotional address titled “Our Relationship with the Lord” that branded Pace’s book as “unwise” because it contained “plain sectarian nonsense.”
…
On another occasion he publicly condemned the concept of salvation by grace alone, dubbing it the “second greatest heresy” of Christendom. (The idea of God as a spirit won top heretical honors as McConkie called it the“father of all heresies.”) In this speech he recalled an experience he had while driving his car and listening to an“evangelist who was preaching salvation by grace alone.” When this radio evangelist offered his listeners an invitation to be saved simply by believing in Jesus, McConkie commented, “Unfortunately I did not accept his generous invitation to gain instant salvation; and so I suppose my opportunity is lost forever.” The crowd laughed. (“What Think Ye of Salvation by Grace?” BYU devotional address, 10 January 1984).
Mormonism teaches that Jesus is literally and spiritually our big brother. We grew up together. We have the same mother and father. He took human form as we did and lived His life with us. There isn’t a much more
personal relationship than that. That isn’t sectarian nonsense and it isn’t evangelical Christianity. It’s a far more intimate and personal fundamental relationship than anything in “orthodox” Christianity. Bruce McConkie doesn’t know that, which makes him ignorant, not a great theologian.
Likewise, the truth is, fundamental Mormon doctrine states that anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior is “saved” and goes to a reward greater than our imagination can illustrate. Not only that, Joseph Smith taught that you will have a chance to accept Christ here or in the next life and it’s all good. Bruce and his Utah cult of personality, and I mean that this time, have no understanding of the difference between the word “salvation,” and “reward.” The simple fact is that Mormons have always believed in a universal salvation based upon “Grace” alone. The problem is, Utah-product McConkie and his fellow intellectual and theological refugees in the Valley-0, have redefined anything short of the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom as damnation and hell, and anyone not clearly a candidate for the highest reward of the highest heaven, as the damned. If you want to talk about false doctrine and heresy Bruce, there you go. I’ll just say it. Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.
What’s wrong with Mormonism? I asked that question in this series long long ago. The answer is right here: You can’t blame Bruce R McConkie for believing what he did, because his brain struggles for logic and inspiration from the isolated confines of an entirely self-contained Utah Mormon culture. His beliefs arise out of the collective “common sense” of a people self-removed into an environment of cultural inbreeding within a complete shelter from criticism. The Utah Mormon culture has actively promoted for generations, an unnatural lack of intellectual or religious insight or intuition. The Utah church has for generations deliberately eliminated, by the usual estimations, some 2/3 of the human race as candidates for their private, closed, extreme, ultra-pious society, because they do not lower themselves to minister to or associate with those who have not demonstrated a high predisposition toward Celestial Glory—as they self-define these characteristics. Furthermore, the Utah culture has officially incorporated into its church dogma the notion that even Celestial Glory is damnation unless the highest degree of Celestial Glory is achieved, and therefore even the very elect may not be elect enough to be worth wasting any time on.
In short: Bruce McConkie believes that if all you’re doing is keeping souls from the fires of hell and teaching people to live good lives, it’s not worth the church’s time and effort. Bruce R McConkie demands performance. Bruce R McConkie demands statistics and measurable, demonstrable piety and an absolute surrender of every aspect of your life to the “program.” The Mormon “program” will get you to the Celestial Kingdom. Mormons think this attitude is the epitome of wisdom and enlightenment. And so, naturally, in his day, still locked in that dusty Zion gestalt, Bruce McConkie easily found a vast and deep following in Mormonism who’s instinct was to simply defer to his greater intellect and wisdom due to his “calling,” rank, and position in the church.
Indeed, Bruce McConkie, was regarded by most of his era’s Latter-day Saints as a spiritual genius with a direct phone line to God, and was hailed by church president, Joseph Fielding Smith, as, “The greatest theologian of his generation in the church.” This might be expected from Smith, inasmuch as he was McConkie’s father-in-law and McConkie was his theological lackey. Smith was not coincidentally the first major Mormon theological organizer in the Mormon leadership chain, to clean and compile LDS doctrine into a coherent guide to Mormon orthodoxy. In this regard, while McConkie was an excellent scholar and had something of a photographic memory for chapter and verse, all he really did in actual practice was serve as his father-in-law’s chief editor and theological promoter. Most of what Bruce R McConkie wrote comes down to a paraphrase of doctrines promoted by Joseph Fielding Smith.
McConkie’s entire body of work is almost exclusively based on the teachings of his father-in-law. Mormon Doctrine is simply an organized collection of doctrinal issues paraphrased from his father-in-law’s previous efforts such as Fielding Smith’s articles from the Ensign, ultimately published as a series of books called Answers to Gospel Questions. McConkie’s second most famous work, Doctrines of Salvation, is, as I say, merely a direct and credited collection of Fielding Smith’s lectures and essays with McConkie commentary bridging and supporting them. McConkie’s Doctrinal New Testament Commentary is again based primarily upon Fielding Smith’s take on Mormon theology. Where McConkie cites previous Mormon authorities, like Brigham Young or Joseph Smith, these references are again chosen as a reflection of Fielding Smith’s use of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fielding_Smith
Those who think me harsh should consider McConkie’s own confession in his last talk before his death:
“I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.” (Ensign, May 1985, p. 11.)
What McConkie clearly admits here, contrary to the belief of most of his fans, is that at the moment of his death he still had not personally seen Jesus the Christ much less had lengthy interrogatives with Him. McConkie’s “inspiration” clearly came through the very conventional means of a “still, small voice” and the same sorts of highly subjective, highly emotional, extremely personal “impressions” anyone else gets. One could easily concede and admire the semantics of McConkie’s faith-based argument that he could not be more sure about Christ’s Divinity, but this leaves neither he nor his fan base with any particularly deep, detailed, or even “new” insight into Mormon “doctrine.”
Bruce R McConkie tells us nothing you could not have read thousands of years ago from better writers and bigger authorities in Proverbs or Psalms or any of the Gospels. Unlike Brother Bruce, all of these ancient authors actually saw, heard, and were taught directly by Jesus Christ. If you follow Elder McConkie’s strongly worded warning to Brother England, go read them instead of checking out what Mo
rmon Doctrine has to say about it.
McConkie’s works in general are characterized by their authoritative tone. McConkie once wrote to a Mormon scholar in 1980, “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”[10] In his best selling Doctrinal New Testament Commentaries and Messiah series, the sources that are most frequently cited as authority for his interpretational positions are other works authored by himself.[11] He explained, “I would never quote another man unless I could first square what he said with the scriptures and unless he said what was involved better than I could.”[1]
What McConkie’s father-in-law did, as president of the church mind you, was something fundamentally different than what McConkie spent his life doing. Joseph Fielding Smith was academically sifting through the thousands upon thousands of LDS commentaries, journals, conference notations and whatnot, trying to validate what he considered to be “correct” doctrines as he understood them, and debunk “false” doctrines as he found them circulating amongst his flock. He did so from a position in the end, of ultimate church authority, as its “prophet” and president. Before that he worked on assignment by the First Presidency. Joseph Fielding Smith also naturally relied upon his own father’s prophetic disposition in these matters—church president Joseph F Smith. Joseph F Smith was the first church president to seriously scrutinize Mormon folklore and even the previously sacrosanct ramblings of Brigham Young, and take an open stance of “correction” regarding the promulgation of many popular Utah Mormon doctrinal myths like Joseph Smith’s alleged “White Horse Prophecy.”
During his administration as President of the Church, President Smith made significant official statements of Latter-day Saint doctrine:
- “The Origin of Man“: In November 1909, in the midst of public i
nterest in theories of evolution, the First Presidency issued a statement concerning the Latter-Day Saint doctrine. It affirms that God created man in his own image. The document also succinctly reiterates the doctrine of twofold creation (spiritual followed by temporal), the premortal existence of man, and ends noting that man, as a child of God, is capable of evolving into a God.
- “The Father and the Son“: On June 20, 1916, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued a statement examining the LDS use of the term “Father” in scripture, clarifying times when the word referred to God the Father and when the word referred to Jesus Christ. The statement identified four different uses of the word “Father.” God the Father is the literal parent of the spirits of mankind and the earthly father of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is referred to as “the Father” when discussing his role as creator of the earth, when he acts as “the Father” of those who abide in his gospel, and when he acts with the authority of his Heavenly Father while on earth.
- “Vision of the Redemption of the Dead“: On October 3, 1918, Smith received a revelation on the nature of the spirit world and on Jesus Christ’s role in ensuring that the gospel is taught to all men, living and dead. A written account of the revelation was submitted to the general authorities of the church on October 31, 1918 and was unanimously accepted. The revelation was initially published in December 1918, and was added to the Pearl of Great Price, an LDS scripture, in April 1976; it has since been removed from the Pearl of Great Price and added to the Doctrine and Covenants as Section 138. This revelation complemented an 1894 statement on the eternal nature of the family and appropriate work for the dead issued by Wilford Woodruff. Genealogy work by members of the LDS Church increased after both of these statements.
Building on F Smith’s doctrinal bent toward unifying historical and contemporary doctrinal issues, his son, Joseph Fielding Smith, took up the cause of a church-wide debunking, clarification, and correction of LDS “doctrine” and put it to the pen. For years, as apostle and president, he published question and answer sessions in church publications and carried this information over into talks, lectures, books, instructional 
manuals and other published media. He was probably the most prolific and most authoritative LDS theological author of all time. He was certainly one of the most coherent. Like his father before him, he wrote in official LDS volumes published by official LDS institutions, and he spoke from apostolic, prophetic, and presidential authority. His son-in-law, Bruce R McConkie, simply out of self-assertion became the last in this particular generation of LDS doctrinal weeding.
Note again however, that McConkie only ever did body-and-fender work. He never built a car. He never designed so much as a hubcap. He had apostolic title, and occasionally published his opinions in LDS official media. Personally however, he added almost nothing to LDS doctrinal knowledge. His work rather, concerns almost purely the rote parroting of other “prophets” and authorities, to which, he adds primarily his own verification of “correctness.” Bruce R McConkie
McConkie had obviously intended to die leaving us his gift of what he considered to be the definitive work on “Mormon doctrine.” But as we see, in a church based on ongoing revelation, “official”doctrine at best can be rather flexible and dynamically gravitate toward greater and greater enlightenment, and at worst, become so diverse and prolific, that it becomes confused and nebulous.
David O McKay, Harold B Lee and others also attempted to thin out the rural Mormon folklore that had long become intertwined with hard-core LDS doctrine, through the Correlation Movement that began in earnest during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Most of this effort was good obviously. But the central, almost egomaniacal assertion hanging like a pall of stupidity over the entire effort to establish a rational, authoritative Mormon “orthodoxy,” is the contention so often boasted from Joseph Smith’s day to the present, that Mormonism has “restored the fullness of the gospel.” While this braggadocio promises a lot in one sentence, it remains a pretty hollow boast. Mormons can’t in fact even agree upon what “gospel” means nor content themselves that they’ve gotten just as full of it as they can get.
Mormon generation after generation keeps prying and poking around vague, disconnected little mental ramblings of the early church authorities, preserved with varied historical legitimacy as if every member of the church was constantly and desperately trying to reassure themselves that they really are in on the secrets of the universe. And the problem is, the nature of that boast and the culture of Mormonism itself, actually encourages the faithful to read, pray, ponder, and have their own “revelation.” Bruce McConkie’s assertions to Eugene England aside, even sticking to the Standard Works, when millions of people take up their right to personal revelation, sometimes they come up with all sorts of queer ideas. This is just as true of LDS leadership over the ages as it is with the general membership. As McConkie said however, when Brigham Young gets a queer idea here and there, I guess it’s just God’s test to see if we’re spiritually stupid enough to fall for it.
So don’t fall for it.
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! "
Mormons are not Christians
Mormons are not Christians.
Let’s all get over that right now. Joseph Smith’s argument was that he was restoring the Church to the way it was supposed to have been all along. Joseph’s claim was that the Church was in total apostasy. Joseph Smith was claiming something unique in the two millennia of Church-State sponsored excommunicationing, confession-torturing, and public stake-burnings that was by then calling itself “Christianity.” Joseph Smith was claiming the whole tradition had departed from its founding principles. Mormons believe that the entire, combined history of today’s Christianity is doctrinally unsound and lacking in authority.
You wouldn’t think so by how hard Mormons now cling to the notion that they’re just another branch of the Christian religion. In their minds of course, they’re actually claiming to be the one, true Christian religion. But then, that’s what everyone else is claiming. We’re right and you guys are all wrong. We have authority and you don’t. I am the Rock, I am Peter. I was founded by Paul. I have 95 reasons why you’re all screwed up so I’m going to reform the Church. Divine Providence has guided us to just these right interpretations of just these right scriptures in just this right version of the Bible and led us to just this right land to prosper, and we’re the only ones who remained true to preserve the true faith.
The thing calling itself Christianity today is not the same as the thing being called Mormonism–even by Mormon standards. Serious problems arise when Mormons start teaching their version of the “gospel,” and lo and behold, the Christian investigator notices it departs wholesale from what they’ve been taught their whole life. Even without the predictable priming of the investigator by their professional Christian clergy or anti-Mormon propagandists, it is inevitable that anyone brought up to believe the conventional Christian storyline will conclude that Mormons are not Christians in the same way everyone else seems to be Christians–and that the Mormons are probably trying to pull a fast one on them. Or they surmise that Mormons are just stupid and don’t know the difference. Which is mostly true in either case.
Since Christians believe they all go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell, the schooled Christian will most of the time just stay safely on the historically Christian side of the debate. Why explore the “fullness” of the gospel, when the gospel you already have is sending you to heaven anyway? For this reason, the Mormon missionary program actually targets those without clear Christian or other religious backgrounds, gives a very broad, generic, rosy sales pitch, begs the hapless, ignorant, spiritually ambivalent investigator to pray about it, and while in some self-induced, emotional, cathartic, faux-religious conversion mode they are challenged, almost dared to jump immediately into the baptismal font. They are urged to just pick up the rest of what they’re going to have to believe after they’re already committed to being a Mormon in principle. It takes the discerning human being of any stripe about five minutes to figure out that this is a buy-now-pay-later religious special-of-the-week sort of marketing program. The investigator rabbits off to the safety of what they already know, or don’t know as the case may be. After all, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The Mormons designing these recruitment drives and even all the instructional manuals, church magazines and those running the doctrinal curriculum of the Mormon church, don’t know a thing about Christianity, much less how a Christian thinks or feels. They don’t know much about how any normal human being feels, because they’re Mormons. Mormons aren’t only not Christians, they’re just not normal. They are a self-selecting, self-taught closed little sample of one particular (deliberately peculiar) type of human being they’ve self-defined to be God’s particular favorite type of human being. They’ve either been raised to be ignorant of the world at large, or are eagerly cultivated into their contrived peculiarity after being hand-picked by the Mormon recruiting system in which like begets like, ignorance cultures ignorance, and the cultureless beget a complete lack of culture. They become special because they are like everyone else in the club. They are unimpressive as individuals, but absolutely brilliant as herd animals.
Chairman Mao said that sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. He maintained that the communist revolution had to be constantly refreshed and purged of intellectuals and thinkers and anyone who might sit back on their laurels and start thinking about “What’s in if for me then?” Or worse yet, “Hey, isn’t this capitalist thing better than what we’ve got going here after all?” In the 1960’s Mao rallied all the communist youth to fink on their elders, raid and destroy anything not Chinese, anything not communist. Art, music, technology, philosophy, it was all burned if it wasn’t determined to be Chinese or communist enough. Anyone who had the brains or memory or experience to raise an intelligent argument in favor of preserving world knowledge and universal beauty, was sent to a re-education camp. All the intellectuals were sent to the rice paddies. The same sort of thing took place the moment all the bright and eargerly converted Mormon Swedes and Norwegians and English and Danish and Scottish pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley. They stopped being Swedes and Norwegians and English and Danish or Scottish, Catholic, or Protestant, and Brigham Young re-educated them into becoming Mormons.
This is exactly what Lenin did to Marxism in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. The movement began with the cream of the cream of the literati, the intellectuals, the academics, the artists and poets and was led by common, naturally chosen social visionaries. After the revolution however, these people with brains in their heads and ideas of their own just got in the way of the Party doing whatever it wanted to do. Which was take care of the Party. And after all, when you make Yuri the former nut-and-bolt fastener from the local tractor factory the new head of Central Planning Committee, he just doesn’t want to take a lot of crap from smart people and he doesn’t understand why they just don’t do what he says and shut up about it. Yuri got promoted simply because of his undying, if unintelligent loyalty to the Party. The same sort of process works the same way in the recruitment and selection of Mormon leadership as well as the membership in general. It’s not what you know, who you are, what you’re capable of, it’s all about loyalty to the Party. Consequently, anything not immediately relevant to rising in, or surviving under the Party has no place in the culture. All non-Mormon intelligence or ethnicity in Utah was effectively eradicated in one generation.
Before David O. McKay in 1952, the Mormon church was still essentially living out the prophet Joseph Smith’s original commission of bringing good Christians into the “fullness” of the gospel. They had lost any sense of what a Christian is or was by then, but they were still trying to relate to Christians as Mormons, not as fellow Christians. They at least knew the difference back then. Mormons actively sought Christians and started their various missionary efforts with what they already knew Christians found to be troublesome doctrines and principles. Back then Mormons spun off the missionary pitch not into a challenge to baptism, but into how modern revelation had fixed all those problems and restored the whole truth to Christianity. Baptism was a decision, not a bet.
In the early days of the LDS church, it was the primary perspective that every Christian had at one time wondered how it was that their third cousin Huckleberry back in Ohio was going to have to burn in hell when he never done nobody no harm and just never took no shine to the Holy Bible. Every good Christian wondered how the hell you could have a three-headed God that was one God but three different characters at the same time. Every Sunday School Christian had asked the preacher that one question or two that got the “It’s a mystery we accept on faith,” answer that really pissed them off and left them wondering their whole lives if this Christian thing wasn’t just a load of hooey. Well, Joseph Smith gave them better answers. Answers to questions they were already asking.
Today’s LDS recruitment program basically says you can just stuff your questions up your backside, get on your knees and ask in total ignorance if this or that is true. Is the Book of Mormon true? Was Joseph Smith a prophet of God? Don’t make us explain any of it and don’t deviate from the discussion we’ve charted out for you. Go for that burning bosom–avoid any pondering or reasoning. As soon as you’re willing to concede that it might be true, throw yourself straight into that “come to Joseph” moment and it will all explain itself later. (And they wonder why convert retention rates are plummeting…)
Mormons don’t even have any idea how big a leap they’re asking the Christian to take. Christianity is actually fairly compatible with Mormonism just by accident, superficially speaking, looking strictly from the Mormon side of it. Mormons don’t believe Christians are going to be burning in hell for openers. Not officially. It’s a similarly “wholesome” lifestyle. They believe in Jesus Christ. Christians don’t have the whole truth, but they’re mostly harmless and sometimes even good. But most of that would apply to any major world religion from the Mormon perspective. Mormons believe that just about anyone not shedding innocent blood or deliberately and knowingly denying the Holy Ghost is going to a paradise exactly like the “heaven” all little Christian kids are told they’re going to fly up to when they die.
Mormon salvation on that level is free. It’s as free as any salvation you’ll get in any good old Christian tent revival. It’s even freer. All you have to do is accept Christ as your savior, and you don’t even have to do it before you die. If all else fails you can have somebody get baptized for you while you’re up there in a heavenly holding cell, waiting for all the paperwork to get signed and the permits issued. You can die a complete heathen and still be a candidate, yes, even for that highest of high Mormon heavens, the Celestial Kingdom.
The dirty, really really annoying little secret is that Mormons can’t even guarantee that their years of Mormonizing is going to insure them a spot in the highest of high levels in heaven. In the Celestial Kingdom they taunt, the righteous will live an afterlife where they hang out with deity and learn how to make planets, create life and really fun stuff like that. The “gentile” as they call them, the non-Mormon of any faith, will not participate in this higher glory. But obfuscated in a lot of 60’s era cleanup and correlation, is a little caveat about God judging and knowing your heart. All those requirements, those commandments you kept, really don’t weigh much in the Final Judgment or at least aren’t the deal maker or breaker in your ultimate fate.
Celestial glory might also just be the end destination of millions or billions of other former mortals who never had to bother with the whole Mormon experience. There’s still a good chance that Joe Christian or even Joe Jew, Joe Hindu or Joe Muslim will end up in the Celestial Kingdom along side of the most Mormony of Mormons, or above them, or even a kingdom or two above them. That’s pretty crappy doctrine for recruitment purposes, and certainly for maintaining that sense of superiority and high morale amongst the elect. You can see why historically, Christianity went another way with that.
The Mormon missionary program became a total victim of the Utah ethos in 1959 when president McKay, coming from a teaching background, quite correctly decided that all the reams of freelance apocrypha flying around the various LDS church organizations ought to be correlated into some sort of final orthodoxy. Prior to this movement, every scrap of lecture, every half-reliable journal entry, every rumored quote or sketchy teaching of every prophet, president or LDS leader of any import could ostensibly be preached as official “doctrine.” McKay first cleaned up the missionary training program into what he called a “systematic approach” to teaching the LDS gospel. 
Harold B. Lee who later also became president of the church was the central figure in this effort and initiated the “Correlation Committee” which since then has maintained absolute authority to sanction or censor any media or organizational program in the church. If it has come out of Correlation, it is “official” Mormon doctrine.
The result of Correlation has been mostly good from an internal standpoint. It purged a century and a half of gibberish and folklore from the burden of what had become an entirely undisciplined and unlimited canon that grew every time some General Authority belched and some other LDS scribbler wrote it down. Externally, it was not so helpful.
Correlation really constitutes the final usurpation of Joseph Smith’s restored Church of Jesus Christ by the “Utah Experience.” Correlation cleaned out everything that Utah didn’t think was relevant—which is all of Christianity for one. Correlation just ignored answering all those difficult early-Mormon and past-prophet-type questions–like blacks and the priesthood, polygamy, or any number of Brigham Young’s musings on Adam being God, or what Brother Brigham had to do with Mountain Meadows. Now, that’s sort of a good thing, because by relegating the bulk of early Mormon zaniness to the purely historical archives, President McKay was trying to sort out what was relevant to the 1950’s Latter-day Saint in a world that kept poking its nose into their happy little valley. At least, he thought, let’s all start singing off the same page instead of defending a pastiche of random thoughts gleaned from a myriad of church leaders over the last century-and-a half.
What Correlation didn’t do, is stop every Tom, Dick, and Bruce R. McConkie from continuing to publish their own versions of Mormonism outside the “official” stream. What Correlation didn’t do, is anything
to harmonize, negate or explain 150 or more years of sometimes radically contradictory, and sometimes just radically odd statements and dissertations alleged to have been uttered by major church authorities it was now choosing to ignore. Correlation Movement proponents apparently believed the whole history of frontier Mormon weirdness would erase itself in a generation. Well, it did erase itself, but only from the “official” church structure. Generations of self-illuminated Mormons on the other hand, just kept reading and believing literally anything they latched onto with some Mormon bigwig’s name on it from any era of the church past or present.
Correlation left generations of young and now older Mormons officially ignorant of their own history except for all the happy, logical, inspiring stuff. Generations of Mormons are now entirely unprepared to deal with Christians and other normal human beings, who frankly, are only interested in getting some sort of answer to the juicy, weird stuff first. When an investigator hears that you claim to be a Mormon but you can’t spit something half-intelligent out about polygamy, they just don’t care to be “challenged” to baptism. They think you’re a sham, or an imbecile. Or, more pointedly, you’ve been brainwashed and kept from the “secret truths” of Mormonism. They don’t trust you and don’t care to listen to you any farther.
Correlation did to Mormon historical and doctrinal truth the same thing Prohibition did for alcohol; it just made all those “unofficial” sources all that much more appealing. When the good stuff right from the Maker dried up, even the faithful went rushing straight to the bootleg Mormon gospel writers, as those historically troubling Mormonological questions just kept rising to the surface generation by generation.
Correlation unfortunately also dragged the meaning of seeking “guidance by the Spirit” down to the level of merely reading something the Committee wrote in a manual somewhere and making you pray hard enough till you believe it’s true. The only input the Spirit gets in all this “guidance” is to swoop down at the end of the lesson and put His stamp of approval on the Correlation Committee’s work. That’s “official” Mormonism today. McKay’s systematic missionary program called it the “Commitment Pattern.” Read a blurb carefully crafted by ad men at church headquarters, challenge the investigator to pray and confirm, then elicit an immediate commitment to live it. The whole pondering and studying thing is obsolete. You want your prospect or “mark” to go with his gut impulse on first blush while he’s emotionally receptive. Never give a mark the option of thinking it over calmly. This tactic is not surprising, since Harold B. Lee was an advertising man and chaired the whole Correlation movement when all these new PR and educational programs were first developed.
The first version of Correlation’s missionary program used flip charts and a door-to-door marketing script along Madison Avenue lines. The present system, while claiming to be a reaction to people eventually getting wise to the canned, fake, hard-sell McKay/Lee era system, is actually just the old system without the locked script. The new missionary approach uses exactly the same formula, and only pretends to fulfill the “teaching by the Spirit” scriptural requirement of the LDS missionary commission. It breaks the discussions into particular concepts, drills the missionary till he can “ad-lib” a lesson that teaches exactly the concept charted out for him or her in his or her “own words.” Then you still dare them to get dunked. No variation, no answers to hard questions. If they’re ready, they’ll go into the font anyway, if not, move forward into the next pitch in the program till you close the sale.
From the Mormon perspective then, one Christian church is about as good as any other. It’s not worth studying. They aren’t trying to convert . Conversion is a long-lost concept. Mormon missionary efforts are based entirely upon trying to hunt and coax out people who are already “prepared” to believe the Mormon narrative regardless of logic, reason, history, tradition or culture. They’ve got a program, a method. It works for them a lot of the time. It’s an almost entirely emotional appeal which you can choose to call “spiritual” if you want to. I suppose if the prospect stays in the church after baptism, it was spiritual. If they wake up a month later and can’t believe what they got themselves into, it was mostly emotional.
The Mormon missionary who tangles with an actual thinker might just as well hoof it to the next door. That chump had their chance. They’ll just have to make do with unimaginable glory, instead of really, really, really unimaginable glory. There is no inescapable suffering in Mormon theology when a missionary fails to score a baptism, not in the long run. (Except for the mission statistics and the missionary’s performance rating, which may be a pretty central issue to most missionaries and mission presidents.)
But Christians will never concede that Mormons are going anywhere but hell. Trying to steal the Christian label from them is going to be fighting words until Jesus returns to pick a side in the debate Himself. And even then they’re going to demand He prove with miracles and firey chariots that He’s really Jesus. The whole Christian belief system collapses if Mormons don’t burn in hell. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is two-thousand years too late to try to claim the Christian brand from them. They have it patented, registered, and trademarked and they will fiercely protect it. And every Christian tradition from the Holy Roman Empire to some little evangelical offshoot on your cable TV public access channel has a belief system that on one level or another, sends everyone, even other Christians, to hell or puts them in danger of hell because they’ve got it all wrong. Or even just this one little part of it wrong. Two thousand years of ecumenical conferences and attempts to nail down general agreements on who really is a true Christian or not, and they’ve only agreed to disagree. They do however agree unanimously that Mormons are not part of the debate. Mormons have crossed the line. And why not? That’s e
xactly what Joseph Smith said about them.
I even wonder sometimes why the Christian brand name is so worth fighting for. It’s just a passing title use once in one minor scripture. And what they’ve done with it over the last two-thousand years isn’t always a thing to praise and respect.
To be correct, I’d also have to say that a lot of Mormons aren’t really even Latter-day Saints. A lot of Mormons believe in UFOs. Some of them will insist it’s in the four standard works if you know where to look. By the book, their book, a lot of apocryphal, anecdotal, pioneer, journal-of-rumors nonsense should have long ago been cleanly parsed out of the main LDS devotional collection of half-baked fables. Because of their ongoing reluctance to rate or denounce one-another, LDS leaders have allowed so much prophetic political leeway that virtually anything said or written by anyone of any authority or position in the Mormon church over the last two hundred years could be credibly argued to be the word of the Lord. For the last fifty years or so all the really goofy Mormon doctrines may have been cleaned out of the official, Correlated belief system—yet they really haven’t been cleaned out of the chain of theoretical authority. These quacky old doctrines have yet to be justified or denied by current leadership. You can take it out of the Sunday School lesson in 1952, but Pastor Bob, the rabid Anti-Mormon of today still has a copy of it and your old Mormon granny still believes in it because that’s what she was taught in Sunday School in 1951. Granny and those zany old codgers in high priest groups down in Payson still pass it all on to their descendants as God’s own truth because the current prophet and the current prophet after that continue to fail to proclaim clearly and authoritatively what Mormon’s don’t believe in.
Unlike Mormonism, Christian sects have only ever had but a handful of convoluted little central doctrines to debate in total. They still killed and excommunicated each other over them for thousands of years, but compared to the volumes of half-thought-out Mormon doctrinal speculations available to the Mormon, Christians have a very simple gospel to bicker about. Mormonism has had to date, less than two centuries to narrow down what it’s going to be all about. It lost its defining prophet very early on in the process, got chased into the wilderness, and has spent most of its time struggling with inbred family feuding, caretaking and nation-building. The Mormon church is full of “authorities.” They all write, and they all have opinions on everything. Mormons simply haven’t had the time, insight or interest to go through the bulk of every little note ever scribbled down and attributed to some prophet or apostle or the other and clean out all the rubbish. It hasn’t been a problem in the Valley till now.
Mormons are extremely ignorant in religious matters overall. Even their own. Make that ignorant in most things cultural, religious, or intellectual. Have I driven that point home yet? Mormons are not chosen because they have unique talents and wisdom. They’re chosen because they agree to get baptized.
Mormons know Mormonism and that’s it. That’s it. That’s what Mormons do: be Mormons. All they know is that hiding out for two centuries in a dusty valley in Utah is the most important human experience in the history of mankind. They claim to have a “Style all our Own” as they were fond of boasting in brow-flogging lectures to their youth, haranguing long hair and beards in the late 60’s and 70’s. But it isn’t a style so much as a lack of style. Mormons have a lack of style all their own. They are overtly attempting to make themselves a peculiar people, but not always in a good way. The style-less, the boring, the intellectually and artistically complacent, the anti-intellectual, they all make great Mormons. They are good, honest, God-fearing folk. They’re just unremarkable as hell. And they have a way of taking a great, even inspired religion and boring it to death. Like begets like and in the closed Mormon system, the pig-ignorant are teaching the pig-ignorant how to find and sign up more of the pig-ignorant. Even if we concede that God provides the Mormon church president with a brilliant idea, the Correlation Movement for example, it’s still going to be executed by a bunch of uncommonly dull and unusually sheltered Utah Mormons.
In a famous interview with the New Yorker January 2002, church president Gordon B. Hinckley speaks to Lawrence Wright:
“I’m the third generation in this Church,” he told me. “My grandfather joined the Church in his late teens in Nauvoo.” Nauvoo, Illinois, was a refuge that the Mormons created in 1839, following an order by the governor of Missouri to run them out of the state. But Illinois soon proved to be worse than Missouri. In 1844, after an anti-Mormon mob murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, the Mormons headed west. Hinckley’s grandfather Ira was among them. Thousands died on the trek across the Great Plains, including Ira’s wife and his stepbrother, Joel, who both died of cholera on the same day in 1850.
Hinckley showed me a small bronze figure of a pioneer standing beside a grave. “Here’s a little statue somebody made of that event, portraying my grandfather’s burial of his wife in a coffin he made somewhere, we know not where. And afterward he picked up his eleven-month-old daughter and carried her to this valley.” Hinckley’s voice grew thick. “Now, that’s my background in this Church, and it’s real, and it’s pragmatic, and it’s Mormonism.”
In the Mormon scheme, every person is a potential divinity. The adage “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be” expresses the Mormon belief that God was once a human being, with a wife and children. But Hinckley did not seem interested in discussing matters of theology. When I asked him to characterize God’s connubial relationship, he replied, “We don’t speculate on that a lot. Brigham Young said if you went to Heaven and saw God it would be Adam and Eve. I don’t know what he meant by that.” Pointing to a grim-faced portrait of the Lion of the Lord, as Young was called, he said, “There he is, right there. I’m not going to worry about what he said about those things.”
I asked whether Mormon theology was a form of polytheism.
”I don’t have the remotest idea what you mean,” he said impatiently.
”More than one god.”
”Yes, but that’s a very loose term,” he replied. “We believe in eternal progression.” By that he meant that human beings can evolve toward godhood by following the Mormon path. “You want to be a reporter always?” he said. “You want to be a scrub forever, through all eternity? We believe that life, eternal life, is real, that it’s purposeful, that it has meaning, that it can be realized. I wouldn’t describe us as polytheistic.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/21/020121fa_FACT1?currentPage=3#ixzz0Y2nzgJ07
- Hinckley Interview in “Lives of the Saint”, New Yorker, January 2002
What’s telling about this interview, is that it was President Hinckley’s idea. It was one of the main showcases of Mormonism in his movement to bring the church out of the Wasatch Front and into the position of a respected, major world religion. His several interviews and media appearances were greeted by the faithful as warm and charming and wonderful for the church. Yes, he came off as a harmless, kindly old grandfather who would never slit your throat in your sleep and probably wasn’t a polygamist pedophile—a nice well-meaning old guy who apparently doesn’t really worship the devil after all. If that’s all the church was hoping for: mission accomplished—till the next outbreak of crazed polygamy in Texas.
At some point, certainly after that interview, somebody in the Mormon establishment might have thought to coach him on how to answer very basic questions he knew were going to keep coming up. The question of monotheism and polytheism relative to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was fought out for the first three or four centuries of the Christian Church. It’s Christianity 101, a freshman question. It’s not an elite question to be asking a man who claims to be the sole representative of all three here on earth. The only two answers to basic questions like these that President Hinckley ever developed during the whole campaign were, “That was then, this is now,” and “We’re beyond that now.” What does that mean? Does that mean, yes, our prophets have been hoodwinking you up to now but it won’t happen again? Those are just lame non-answers a nice old duffer gets away with because nobody wants to be seen as beating him up.
Yeah, in Mormon church president Hinckley’s 2002 media blitz the world saw perhaps the church as a whole to be harmless and perfectly willing to forget all about troubling questions of the past. Even if the past was only 1978. But the world gave President Hinckley and his church a pass only in the context of chuckling along with a simple, provincial old Utah hick who knew nothing about Christianity and even less about the church he claimed to be the prophet, seer and revelator of.
Any Mormon prophet with millions of church members around the world believing him to have a direct pipeline to God could not at some point avoid asking for a bit of advice on the whole Adam-God issue from the Divine Creator he claims to be chief witness of. Yes or no. It’s a simple question. Was Brigham Young misquoted or wrong, or is Adam in fact God? Yes or no. To say it doesn’t matter is disingenuous. It matters to every member of the church what every prophet says. The Brethren keep telling them every prophet speaks in “modern scripture.” The whole point of modern prophecy is to get answers. The true nature of God matters. Joseph Smith wrote whole books on answers to questions just like that. So did Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith and others before the Correlation era.
Anyone claiming to be spokesman for Jesus Christ ought to be able to say definitively whether or not he’s 
really speaking for Adam instead. Couldn’t any LDS church president easily call a big council on the matter and finally come out and say, for instance, that no, we carefully studied the subject and decided that Adam is not God and we don’t care what Brigham Young may or may not have meant about it? It is oxymoronic for a prophet seer and revelator to say, “I don’t know” on any matter of church doctrine.
That’s his whole job—to get answers. That’s the whole Mormon church. Getting answers from God through a living prophet.
So either this prophet, seer and revelator thing today works rather differently than the way Mormons imagine it to work, or the whole thing’s a bluff. The Mormon prophet either sits down with Jesus every morning and can ask anything about anything and answer any question with absolute, perfect knowledge and authority, or if not, the Mormon prophet and church president at least most of the time, is subject to the normal standards of personal revelation like everyone else. The problem with answering this question officially, is that it would have to come from the very prophets, seers, and revelators it applies to. They would either be ranking previous prophets as errant, or admitting they aren’t inspired enough to know what the heck their predecessors were rambling on about. They would be self-diminishing their own omniscience and that of every LDS General Authority before them and forever after. An LDS prophet would become a far less infallible leader in the eyes of the faithful masses. It’s sort of like expecting Congress to vote for their own pay cut.
Does the Mormon prophet talk directly, regularly, face-to-face with Jesus Christ as it is widely held? The Brethren have coyly allowed this assumption to go unchallenged. Until recently it was quite popular for General Authorities to make frequent, vague, public allusions supporting this notion. Or does the reigning Mormon prophet have to make do for the most part with listening for quiet promptings from that still, small voice, after a lot of study, prayer, and pondering? Does it then really just come down to being informed, educated, and discerning enough to know what questions to ask–or at least know that questions need to be asked?
It’s one thing to say: I’m a simple representative of the third-generation of a young church and my entire world view, my entire religious experience is of my family and people getting kicked around and hiding in a dustbowl. Consequently, I see Mormonism as a very common, unsophisticated and pragmatic religion. But it’s stretching that excuse beyond all sense and reason to call yourself a “prophet” and then admit you really don’t know much about your own doctrines past or present when you’re the guy directly in charge of defining present doctrine and interpreting past doctrine.
For the highest Mormon leadership to dismiss early Christian history as unimportant is perhaps forgivable. It is myopic but perhaps it’s just laziness or a shortcut to getting their point across, which is, Christian history is all wrong anyway. For Mormon church leadership to pretend however that they can’t say for sure what present Mormonism is all about is just silly. If you’re the prophet, the president of the church, it’s about whatever you say it’s about.
Mormons are not Christians. But the sad truth is, today’s Mormons are also no longer Mormons in the same sense that Joseph Smith was a Mormon—or even in the same sense that the pioneers who followed Brigham Young to the Salt Lake Valley were Mormons. They are not led by prophets who function in the same capacity or at least to the forthcoming degree that Joseph Smith functioned as a prophet. Joseph Smith’s Mormonism was a young, innovative, radically liberal frontier rebellion from the well-understood world-Christian status quo. Contemporary Mormonism by contrast is a collection of committees populated with elderly Utahans who grew up isolated in a comfortably settled, exclusively Mormon paradise along the Wasatch Front courtesy of Brigham Young and company. The modern Mormon church is now apparently longing to simply fit back into the world Christian tradition somehow. Lacking any major personal vision, bereft of any personal history of life-and-death physical and spiritual heroism, they have fallen into a worship of the ancestors who provided them with their comfortable little society through bygone years of work, study, hardship, suffering, and an undying faith in God. But they can only emulate them in a romanticised, revisionsist glory, because it is no longer within their realm of understanding to know what made them tick deep inside.
Joseph Smith brought Mormonism into the world kicking butt and taking names. Now Mormonism just wants to be accepted. Now Mormonism just wants a hug. Joseph Smith rejected all of orthodox Christianity almost two-hundred years ago as of this writing. His followers have been licking wounds, quarreling with the Christian dominated US government and chasing their own theological tails pointlessly around in circles in a big dirty rift out in Utah ever since he was murdered.
Today, Joseph Smith’s legacy just wants a comfy chair, some peace and quiet, and a nice long nap. They’re not looking for the best and the brightest. They’re not looking for an improved understanding of God and His wonderous universe. They don’t want pioneers or religious revolutionaries. They’re just looking for people who do what they’re told, don’t dress scruffily, don’t smoke, drink, take coffee or tea, play nicely with others, and won’t make trouble. That’s Mormonism to them now.
I guess Mao was right.
