Posts Tagged ‘polygamy’
Glenn Beck Part 4: My Favorite Klingon
By 1963 there wasn’t a mainstream corporate sponsor or conservative organization that would have anything to do with Willard Cleon Skousen. The American Security Council kicked his arse out saying he’d gone off the deep end. William C. Mott, judge advocate general of the US Navy and ASC member said Skousen was “money mad…totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen
That year, Robert Welch, John Birch Society founder, claimed that president Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and Skousen jumped on it with both feet. Skousen’s clients threw him to the curb. The National Association of Manufacturers, formely gracious anti-Communist sponsors of Skousen’s speaking tours, released an official condemnation of both Skousen and the John Birch Society, expressing its intent to disassociate itself from any individual or party who subscribed to their views. Skousen just wrapped his critics into the conspiracy and authored a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”
Except for every High Priest Group in Mormondom, Klingon Skousen laid low for a lot of the ’60s. When he resurfaced at the end of the decade he was promulgating a new family of conspiracies that bundled all the world’s problems into the doings of the capitalist “dynastic rich,” as he called them. Specifically, Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. These culprits Skousen now claimed, were using communist and leftist agents like Ho Chi Minh and the American civil rights movement to accomplish their evil goals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related
In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).
Skousen claimed in The Naked Communist that Commies were out to take over the world because they were evil dominators of the human soul.
In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
…Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium.
Skousen warns readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:
. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:
“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”
(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)
Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:
“Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.
“Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”
The Naked Capitalist on the other hand, now claimed that Communists were only puppets of the dynastic rich. The Council of Foreign Relations and other Liberal internationalist groups were really the minions of these ultra-rich, who wanted to manipulate world events and nations into a single One World Government, or a New World Order.
Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
…”The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
At this point Skousen became the Godfather of countless offshoots and Skousen cells in every conspiratorially oriented organization on the face of the planet. He boasted before he was done, of authoring 44 books and pamphlets, but in my father’s words, he actually just wrote the same book 44 times. His diatribes, particularly corrupted every priesthood quorum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You could also say he infiltrated the Boy Scouts as well, because in the LDS church they are one and the same. The LDS church is the single largest affiliate of Scouting USA. Entering the 1970’s Skousen led the charge against the American Civil Rights Movement. ET Benson’s grandson Steve writes:
Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.” The article asserted that:
” . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”
Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”
He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”
Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:
” . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.”
In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:
“. . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . . Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .” [1976]
Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”
Skousen further declared:“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”
He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.” [1987]
[Skousen had also previously claimed that the US would fall to Communism by 1973.]
In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:
“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.
(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431
Unable to content himself with any single paranoid theory, Skousen moved from frantic brainfart of idiocy to frantic brainfart of idiocy, as one world-ending conspiracy and one set of heinous traitors after another failed to bring America down into Satanic bondage. In 1971, Skousen founded The Freeman Institute, which claimed it intended to provide BYU students a place to read both sides of any political issue from original sources. The truth is, it got weirder and weirder until was thrown off campus In 1982. It was probably no coincidence that church president Spencer W Kimball was announcing the construction of a temple behind the Iron Curtain in Freiberg Germany, and BYU president Dallin Oaks was battling with world academia to maintain the university’s scholarly credibility in light of Skousen’s wild-arsed political and “historical” hackings, and the spawn of similarly eccentric BYU “scholars” like Hugh Nibley and others, who were inventing the pretend science of “Book of Mormon Archeology,” linking Joseph Smith to ancient Egyptian texts, and delving into Masonic, folk-magic and mystical connections to all of the above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Nibley
By 1983, Skousen’s Freeman Institute had re-branded itself the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), and headquartered itself in a survivalist compound in Malta, Idaho. Most importantly, it would be dead as a doornail right now if not for Glenn frigging Beck…
In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with theConstitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[19][20] Skousen’s proposals with the group included a plan to convert the Social Security system to private retirement accounts, as well as a plan that he claimed would completely wipe out the national debt.
Although Skousen was not a tax protester, he did campaign for several proposals to eliminate the federal income tax. One proposal, the Liberty Amendment, precluded the federal government from involvement in any activities that competed with private enterprise and returned federally-owned land to the states.
In 1987, controversy erupted in California when the state briefly considered using Skousen’s book, The Making of America, as a textbook for California schools. Statements in the book regarding slavery, and its use of the term “pickaninny” as a label for slave children engendered a heated debate as to whether the book was appropriate.
…In one instance, the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”[18]
Now, some of Skousen’s political proposals admittedly sound fine to me. His history however, is rubbish. His obsession with finding a Commie or “Insider” under every bed is embarassingly naïve. In fairness, scholars would likely say the same thing about my scribblings. But I don’t care what “scholars” think any more than Cleon Skousen did, so here’s my main point for you Glenn Beck: Skousen’s fairly rapid demise had been set in motion in his affiliation particularly with Tim LaHaye and their Born Again, evangelical dynasty. What had begun to happen was a homogenization of Mormon loony conspiracy freaks with more mainstream Christian Republican Conservative political organizations. That’s a lot like your ministry Glenn. And by no accident I’m sure, as a Skousen acolyte. The Christian Right however, is Christian. Even if they liked Skousen’s patriotic, conspiratorial lippping-off to the Powers-That-Be, Klingon Skousen and his Mormon zealots already figured into the very center of most of the era’s expanding Apocalyptic Christian conspiracy theories. The more Mormon folklore Skousen worked into the conversations in his primarily Christian Conservative think-tanks, the more his Christian “friends” began to think that they didn’t want Mormons coming to the rescue of the Constitution.
There is no “Nephite Cycle” in the Bible. There is no “White Horse Prophecy” in Christendom. Skousen was just too weird, too insanely desperate to save America, too embarrassingly obvious in his belief that Mormons were Christians, too clearly earnest in his professions that Mormons are going to save the world for Christ, and that Mormonism would be the Constitutional Army of Liberation in America, not the Christian Right.
The bottom line is, Christians have no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. The Constitution is an enlightened document. It arose out of Deism, Masonry, and the European Enlightenment, not the Bible. For God’s sake, for the sake of all mankind, for the benefit of all that is holy, you cannot look at the concepts in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, and connect them with the oppressive tenets of “Historic Christianity.”
Even ignoring all his other lunacy, Skousen was fundamentally suicidal in falling into lock-step with Christian Nation theories. Declaring America a Christian Nation leads to Carthage Jail, Liberty Jail, the Haun’s Mill Massacre, Johnson’s Army and an American Geneva based upon Calvin’s oppressive “Christian” model.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Which brings me again brother Beck, to your personal political pornography, throughwhich you must enjoy yourself immensely and repeatedly if your gushing commentaries are any indication: The Five Thousand Year Leap. This is Klingon Skousen’s “inspired” masterpiece:
Since this book was all over the New York Times bestseller list in 2009, and generated an unprecedented interest in this until-now obscure author, it deserves an extended discussion. The book is an analysis of the Founding Fathers of the United States and their political and economic beliefs, written from a decidedly conservative (in the modern American sense) point of view, but the content is not particularly explicitly Mormon to the degree that would alienate readers of other faiths. The title of the book refers to both the author’s belief that the earth was about 5000 years old at the time of the founding of the United States, and also that social and economic progress took a great 5000 year leap forward nearly instantaneously upon the founding of the United States after centuries of slow progress and stagnation. The book was originally published in the wake of a conservative shift in American politics around the time of the election of Ronald Reagan, and more specifically in the context of a western U.S. protest movement against federal land policies circa 1981 known as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” which was especially strong in the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.
The book begins with a discussion of the political spectrum. Skousen asserts that the view of the “far right” as Fascism and the “far left” as Communism is erroneous and that Fascism and Communism are really the same thing: “ruler’s law” (or, law dictated by a single ruler or party). He proposes that a more accurate political spectrum would be: “far right” is anarchy or no government, “far left” is any form of “ruler’s law” or
totalitarianism, and the political center is a limited representative government of, by and for the people. The first section moves on to a discussion of the Founding Fathers and places both the Jeffersonian Democrats and the Hamiltonian Federalists in the political center of their day. He draws parallels between the laws and government of the ancient Israelites and Anglo-Saxon common law (and, although Skousen shows no sign of believing in British Israelism himself, cites a British Israelist writer – Howard B. Rand – as his source on this) and asserts that both were the basis of the U.S. Constitution. He believes the first attempt at forming a United States government in the Articles of Confederation failed because they erred too far toward his definition of the right (anarchy), while the strong-central-government faction of the Federalists and most European monarchieserred too far to the left (ruler’s law). The United States Constitution, on the other hand, was right in the center where it should have been. He attributes this to “28 principles” which he believes the Founders held to, and make up the second portion of the book:
- Natural law as the legitimate basis of government (he defines natural law here as divine law derived from God)
- A virtuous and moral people
- Virtuous and moral leaders
- Without religion a government of free people cannot be maintained
- All things were created by God
- All men are created equal
- Equal rights, not equal things
- Unalienable rights
- To protect man’s rights, God has revealed divine law
- Sovereignty of the people
- The majority of the people may alter or abolish a tyrannical government
- Republican form of government (“a republic, not a democracy”)
- Protection of the people against the human frailty of their rulers
- Property rights
- Free-market economics
- Separation of powers
- Checks and balances
- Importance of a written Constitution
- Limited powers of government
- Majority rule, minority rights
- Strong local self-government
- Government by law, not by men
- An educated electorate
- Peace through strength
- Avoid entangling alliances
- Protecting the role of the family
- Avoiding the burden of debt
- The United States has a “manifest destiny” to be a blessing to the entire human race
A fascinating mix, that. Many of these principles nobody would argue with; they are foundational to liberal democracy and representative government. Many of them however
try to make the case that liberal democracy (Skousen prefers them term “republic” over “democracy”) and representative government can only exist when they are rooted in religion, specificallyChristianity; and that the Founders were God-fearing Christians and this (rather than, say, the values of the European Enlightenment, freethought, and liberal views on religion such asDeism) were what guided the Founders. This attempt at shoehorning liberal representative government together with essentially theocratic views makes this book an early example of a genre of historical revisionism that has since become a staple within the religious right, such as the books by David Barton. Glenn Beck is a Mormon convert and it is likely that this is the reason that out of all the thousands of possible books he could have picked, he chose to bring Skousen’s book out of obscurity as a sort of manifesto; much of the religious right has instead been promoting the more recent books by David Barton. Beck seems to have picked up on the cue and now frequently has Barton on his television and radio shows to promote his
nonsenseviews. Beck’s promotion of Skousen’s work has led many ultraright conservatives to embrace Skousen’s distortion of the political spectrum, mainly for the purposes of blaming both Communism and Nazism on the left.
For you Gentiles out there, I’m not going to beat this White Horse to death. I’ll just summarize my thoughts by saying The 5000 Year Creep doesn’t give me either religious or political orgasms in the way Glenn Beck seems to experience the book. I’d simply say it’s his least asinine work.
Highlighted by Skousen’s self-damning ignorance of basic Christian theology, there are a number of elements in Glenn Beck’s confused potpourri of populist paranoia that are simply suicidal to Mormonism or any other non-Christian belief system. The first of these is buying into any suggestion that the Constitution of the United States of America is born of “Christian” roots. Anyone who knows anything about Christian history would not find that very enticing, even if he were a Christian.
Christians simply don’t know what’s good for them, and a Christian Nation isn’t good for anyone, not even them. If the nation is Christian, the State defines Christianity and stifles any competing theology. That’s not a good thing. To the average Christian idiot, it sounds great. The Founding Fathers weren’t however, the average Christian idiots.
Make the State Christian, and there’s always the chance you wouldn’t be the right sort of Christian, and end up on the rack or being publicly roasted. Facts are facts, and that’s exactly what every “Christian” society has done—when it was not engaged in the wholesale extermination of non-Christians or “heretical” Christians as it re-defined itself from time to time or its subjects found inspiration in other ideas. And Mormons are not Christians. Mormons would not only be seriously screwed-over in a “Christian Nation,” they already have been. Constantly and repeatedly from day-one. To believe otherwise makes you a lackey pawn, a dupe of what Christian Nation Crusader James Kennedy called “The Holy Conpiracy.”
And how did the Holy Conspiracy work its way around the Contitutional protection of Mormonism Glenn? Do you remember? Do you even know?
In a letter to William Short Thomas Jefferson wrote:
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. [13 April, 1820.]
Perhaps it’s Thomas Jefferson who should be called a prophet here? What else was going on in April of 1820 or thereabouts by the way…say in rural New York? And does this quote from Finis Ewing, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the most famous Presbyterian in the history of Morm
onism ring a bell?
The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.
Well Glenn, at first Christianity tried to just charge Joseph Smith with plain old heresy—again and again, from New York to Missouri, and when the charges never stuck they tried wrapping heresy around fraud or some other actual legal claim and they still never got Joseph nailed properly after scores of hearings and trials. Then the good Christian ministers of Daviess County Missouri held a little meeting of all the prominent clergy, civil officials, and leading citizens in the fellowship hall. Over coffee and treats they agreed that the Constitution didn’t offer sufficient protection from Mormonism, and if they didn’t do something about it they’d be overrun with Mormon and quickly be the minority vote in the region. So they penned out their own “Secret Constitution,” which the Mormons called the “Mob Manifesto,” in which the swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to eradicate Mormonism through any means necessary.
The Holy Conspiracy initially discovered that if you bully Mormons away from a public polling place during an election, they beat the crap out of you. They next discovered that if you shoot at Mormons trying to vote they shoot back. Then they learned that if they shot back they could call the governor, who was part of the conspiracy to negate the Mormon vote in the first place, and he’ll gratefully issue an order of extermination for you on the grounds of treason and insurrection. Only the fact that Mormons are pretty damned good with a rifle slowed this genocidal effort down enough that God eventually reached enough still-functionally “Christian” hearts that the regional population, the national population in general, began to ask, hey, isn’t burning, beating, raping, pillaging, slaughtering and tormenting plain dumb white men women and children sort of er, evil or something? (Injins, niggers–yeah. No problem. But white folks?)
When the local Christian clergy tried to get the Mormons eradicated again in Illinois, the Holy Conspiracy had learned its lesson well from Missouri. You didn’t need secret meetings and blood oaths. You didn’t need to try to construct a treatise of your legal or moral apologetics to justify your actions. All you had to do was publish abroad Christ’s permission to exterminate the Mormon heretics and take anything you want of them for plunder, and either just out of greed, bloodlust or even missplaced “Christian” zeal, via the “will no one rid me 
of this troublesome priest?” principle, a mob will cheerfully arise to oblige. You don’t need to control the whole state militia, all you need is a key officer or two, a mob-friendly detatchment or so, and once they start hollering and shooting and point at the “enemy,” the rest of the regiment will just join in out of reflex. Once you have the Mormons shooting back to defend themselves, well, the game is on, no more explanations necessary. Look at the Mormons. They’re shooting at us. Better kill them all before they do the same to us.
But even the Illinois tactics were transparent enough that “Christians” throughout the nation looked at the “mob” violence of Nauvoo and Carthage, and while nobody could directly claim this time that actual ministers of God were leading the charge under the Christian flag, it was still condemned as inexcusably uncivilized, whether Joe Smith and the Mormons had it coming or not. Sure, in Missouri they tried to trans-substantiate “heresy” into “insurrection” or “treason” but never got it to stick. So again, after a lot of manoevering and legal bullshite, Joseph Smith’s critics in Nauvoo managed to hang “treason” on his “heresy” for acting as chair of the city council and condemning an anti-Mormon printing press. That’s what actually got him killed mind you. But like Missouri, Smith never ended up in court. In Missouri he was allowed to escape to save the state the embarassment of trying to explain their extermination order and resulting attempted genocide. In Carthage Illinois, the militia “guards” protecting Smith just parted one night and let a barely disguised mob of their fellows up the stairs to shoot the hell out of him. Again, it saved the Holy Conspiracy from all the Constitutional bickering and Christianity as usual got what it wanted without the incumberance of due process.
In Utah, the Holy Conspiracy first denied Mormonism admittance to the union as its own State of Deseret,
despite more than meeting all requirements. As a state Mormons would be free to be the majority, grow, populate, civilize, and vote their own conscience and cultural or regional interests like any other citizen other of the United States. Congress however, amid much debate, admitted Utah only as a territory, where it could be administered directly by the Christian Congress.
When Brigham Young got tired of the cronies, whores, and carpetbaggers Washington kept sending out to profiteer off the blood and sweat of the Saints, as Governor, he fired an apparently unreliable guy named Magraw from the mail service, because Mormons had long been maintaining supply trails and outposts from coast-to-coast and simply tagging mail service onto the regular Mormon cargo contracts was faster and cheaper. Magraw turned out not surprizingly to have been awarded his 
mail contract via his well-placed Washington cronies, and like a good little Holy Conspirator, once again cried that the whole territory was in bondage of Brigham Young and disloyal to the United States. This resulted in Congress appointing a Christian governor, and sending him to usurp Brigham Young with an army of occupation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War
After a little drama, the Mormons let the new governor come right on in. The army, well, just so they got the message, that they starved out for a year, cut off and surrounded, vulnerable in the canyon. Cummings, the new guy, negotiated entry of the army, and basically nothing much happened. He reported back that nothing much seemed to be going on in the territory worth mentioning and wondered what all the fuss was about. But, the Christian camel having poked its nose into the Mormon tent, eventually the whole beast forced its way inside. And again, Christianity found it could do nothing much about Mormonism. Until it discovered polygamy.
And here’s where the Holy Conspiracy learned it could do with a stroke of the pen what it had been trying to do for decades through all the combined violence of modern warfare: they made polygamy illegal. No, it wasn’t already illegal. Nobody had thought to make it illegal. But this was Calvin’s America, and The Holy Conspiracy forged the polygamy issue into a sword it then aimed at the heart of Mormonism:
Reynolds v. United States (1878)
This was the first of the Mormon cases. Congress had passed a law making it a criminal offense to
commit bigamy in any of the territories under control of the Federal government. The defendant, charged with violating this law, asserted as a defense that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and that its doctrines required him to practice polygamy or plural marriage. He claimed further that enforcement of the law against him would violate his religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court rejected this contention and affirmed the conviction….
Marriage, the Court held, is a relationship created, regulated, and protected by civil authority. The monogamous family is the basis of Western societal life, and it was never doubted that government had the power to preserve it by prohibiting polygamy. The fact that the defendant’s religious convictions require him to practice polygamy no more immunizes him from the operation of the law than would a person’s religious belief in human sacrifice immunize him from the operation of the laws against homicide. To permit religious beliefs to justify polygamy would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and would in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself….
Page 109, Church and State in the United States , Anson Phelps Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, 1964, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
The Court’s reasoning isn’t even out of the Bible. It just pays lip-service to Christian tradition using the code-word “Western societal life” without any Biblical or Constitutional justification at all. Ignoring the spurious human sacrifice analogy, what this ruling actually does it wrest from the hands of God, the formerly Holy Bonds of Matrimony, and surrendered the institution of marriage to the authority of civil officers, who are now, by this precedent, free to administer it according to any currently popular social conventions. Like Gay marriage. Or at this point, polygamy.
Well Christianity, be careful what you wish for—you might get it. You put marriage under civil jurisdiction to feck over the Mormons, and now it’s your turn. You made marriage a strictly social and political issue, and now you’re on the losing side of the social argument, aren’t you? Payback’s a bitch isn’t she? And she doesn’t even make you breakfast in the morning.
Here, anyone wondering why Harry Reid might be a Democrat and a Mormon too ought to have a little look at this:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jishs/101.3-4/vitale.html
It’s a historical overview explaining how Joseph Smith voted Democrat as well, and more importantly why. As a matter of fact Glenn, in spite of self-righteous Far-Right elitists like yourself and Skousen, rather a helluva lot of Mormons are Democrats. A bunch of them are actually socialists. Probably a lot of actual Communist Party members of the church by now. It’s a big wide world.. It’s not all about Chief Skousen brown-nosing General Authorities and scaring the hell out of them with tales of world-shaking evil headed their way: Howdy brethren–what’s shakin’ on temple square today brother this and elder that. Have you heard the one about the Commie who snuck the tape recorder into the Endowment session and played it all on CCCP1?
OK, I’ll condense it: Joseph Smith was a Democrat because the Democrats like president James Buchannan initially argued that Mormons should be able to have their own state and make their own laws as they saw fit. Because the Democrats, not the Republicans, argued that the Consitution protected religious practices like plural marriages. Because the Democrats argued that specifically in polygamy there is no crime or peril to the greater good from what consenting adults want to get up to in the private sovereignty of their own homes and their own beds. Democrats argued that the citizens of a state or territory ought to be able to rule on the matter themselves according to their own social norms.
The Republicans, like party founder Justin Smith Morrill on the other hand, were arguing that Mormons were heretics and polygamy was as barbarous as slavery, and Mormons had no right to self-government in a “civilized” read: Christian, society:
Under the guise of religion, this people has established, and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world…. As well might religion be invoked to protect cannibalism or infanticide. Yet we are told, because our Constitution declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency that artful men may seek to hide, under the name of religion! However, it is impossible to twist the Constitution into the service of polygamy by any fair construction…. Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?
Sounds a bit like the Glenn Beck show. Or old recordings of Cleon Skousen.
Once Christianity finally had something with which to “legally” skewer the Mormons, once they’d essentially made at least one purely Biblical doctrine unique to Mormonism illegal on purely “Christian” grounds, they sharpened their anti-polygamy blades keener with every passing year. They wrote into laws test oaths that denied Mormons the right to vote. They defined as “treason,” not the practice of, but the mere belief in
polygamy as a Biblically correct principle. Then they made even being a member of an organization that believed plural marriage to be Biblically correct, a confession of “treason.” Then they declared all the lands, funds and properties of any “treasonous” organization should be forfeit to the territorial civil authorities. They banned Mormons from running for office, so soon all civil officers in the territory were appointed by Christians in Congress, or were fellow Christians elected by a tiny Christian minority who ruled the vast Mormon majority of the region.
I want to make this clear, and not just for you Glenn Beckers, neo-Skousenites, or other religious types reading this: The Holy Conspiracy, the “Christian Nation” and its “Christian” Supreme Court, ruled in 1878, that it was perfectly legal and Constitutional to deny anyone who disagrees with “Historic Christianity’s” system of beliefs the right to participate in American politics as either voter or candidate, to own land, property, or associate with like-minded Americans. Mormons were the first official victims of actual “thought crime” legislation. Christians used this one doctrinal tool, this one almost universally agreed-to but utterly harmless Mormon Biblical oddity, to systematically strip the Mormons of every scrap of property they had. They literally stole all Mormon edifices and meetinghouses and rented them back to the church under State supervision at great profit. They made every wife a Mormon husband could be proved to have cohabitated with, a crime punishable by five years in prison. They broke up families, threw old men in jail to rot and die and left the destitute, breadwinnerless wives and children to fend for themselves.
(And of course, they carefully wrote their anti-polygamy laws so the Army and teams of Washington carpetbaggers infesting the state could continue to hump and whore around as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t set up housekeeping or make their multiple-partnered sex a legitimate, permanent arrangement.)
Glenn. That’s how a “Christan Nation” works bub. Sorry. Just is. I’m not guessing here. You’re the guy who keeps telling us to learn from history before it’s too late.
Physician heal thyself.
Christians own their own damned label. I don’t want to fight over it. In any case, Mormons can’t simply steal it and redefine the word as they see fit. That may play well in Provo, but one Mormon backwater town in the desert doesn’t amount to diddly squat in the world of politics and religion—or even the world of dictionaries. The last thing in the universe a Mormon would want to do is hand over Constitutional sovereignty to a bunch of hard-core, Bible-thumping Christians. The Founding Fathers defeated these “Historical” Christians in writing the Constitution. They pulled one over on them–Joke’s on you Calvin, Wesley, Arminius, Augustine, Luther, Pope One and Pope Two. The Great Architect of the Universe faked-out all of history’s so-called “Christians” who had been thus far perpetually claiming to worship Him via beating the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them. The religious and intellectual rebels on the Constitutional panel with free and truly inspired hearts and minds wrote God’s true will into the Constitution instead.
That’s the Mormon position Glenn. That’s Joseph Smith’s “Original Argument.” If you believe Joseph Smith that is, rather than Klingon Skousen. I know who I’ll go with. How about you?
America is not a Christian Nation and I and grateful for that. America is a pluralistic, free republic, and open
religious society. We should all thank God, or the Deity of choice for it. Or no Deity at all. Thank the Founding Fathers. You may think me a weird-arse bigot and pinhead for believing anything in Mormonism, but the Constitution allows me to be a pinhead and bigot, and believe anything I want. I just don’t get to exercise my bigotry. That would infringe upon the rights of other citizens who are mutually protected by the Constitution. I can talk about it all I want though. And Glenn, one more time: That sort of religious liberty is not a Christian concept. Period.
Everybody gets their say, and nobody gets to hurt the other guy for saying it. God Bless America. Nature’s God.
Glenn Beck, you and your new “ghost” writing partner, the specter of Klingon Skousen, want to destroy America. You want to destroy the Constitution in order to save the Constitution. You want to put sinners who play cards or curse or skip church in stocks. You want to imprison or drive out homosexuals and free thinkers and scholars and anyone who would care to argue with the clergy to die alone in the wilderness. You want to burn witches and heretics–you just call them Communists and Progressives and Liberals. Glenn, you and no doubt Wee Willy Skousen would contend: that’s not what we want at all. But that’s certainly the way Police Chief Willard Cleon Skousen ran Salt Lake City when he had his crack at a theocracy. Of course you don’t want a Christian Police State Glenn. You preach about the dangers of incrementalism but you and Skousen’s ghost are both apparently too stupid to realize that’s what every single Christian Nation in the history of the world has led to.
The US Constitution is not the product of a Right Wing think tank. It’s the result of hard-fighting, enlightened,
classical Liberals. Skousen’s analysis of the world’s political spectrum is the infantile, ethnocentric groaning of a myopic, egocentric, provincial paranoid who’s only ever looked as far as the next church spaghetti dinner for his understanding of either politics or religion. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, these are entirely subjective and conditional terms. A Conservative Russian is a flaming Marxist. This terminology has never been either precise or absolute. Without a context and a comprehensive, overlooking frame of reference they are as useless as anything else Cleon Skousen doesn’t quite get. Which is rather a lot. Really Glenn, don’t you have an inkling of discernment in you? What’s “Liberal” in Provo is “Conservative” in Minneapolis. What’s “Conservative” in Austin Texas is Leftist Propaganda in Orem Utah.
I’ve got news for you Glenn Beck, the louts who looted and trashed the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle weren’t from the Right. They were raving Lefties. They were self-professed Anarchists. Anarchy does not come from the Right by any known definition of Right. Police Chief Cleon Skousen was a Right Wing Zealot and he did not represent the face of Anarchy. It’s inane. Skousen argues in effect, that since the Right is always for law and order, as he clearly is, that at some point the absolute most law and order you can have is Anarchy.
Because he’s an ass.
More blatantly Glenn, you and Skousen argue that all the violence today, all the totalitarian, Nanny-State, repressive governmental stifling of basic human rights, religious and intellectual freedom, comes from the Left. In quaint, Hannity or Limbaugh-era terms: The Problem is Liberals you say. You point out example after example and grin smugly, laughing at anyone who doesn’t catch your brilliance—daring the world to challenge your empirical masterwork. But you’ve missed a pretty obvious point Glenn.
Those officious shitebites you keep indicting aren’t Liberals. There aren’t any Liberals any more. Chairman Mao said: sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. Well, it has. They fought the Establishment, they beat the Establishment, and now they ARE the Establishment. They rocked the vote, and now they’re not going to rock the boat, and they won’t let you rock it either. What was radical, revolutionary, and represented the product of allowing period “Liberals” to think freely and explore alternatives to the existing political and social structure, has now been codified, canonized, carved in stone and will be just as vigorously beaten into the captive citizenry as any other retrograde, reactionary, Conservative movement. Opposing ideologies will be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
The guys who politically rescued Mormonism in spite of itself in the early days were Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Whigs and Republicans just wanted to wipe Mormons out. The only totalitarian regime ever to infiltrate and rule in this great land was the Puritan government at Plymouth Colony. America’s Children of the archetypal ruling Christian bastard, John Calvin, made the Taliban look like amateurs.
Willard Cleon Skousen had it all arse-backwards. Don’t follow this buffoon’s intellectual dyslexia ‘round and ‘round until your powers of reason disappear into your own arsehole as well.
If you won’t believe me, if you won’t believe Joseph Smith, perhaps you’ll believe James Madison:
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries. [James Madison, 1803 Letter objecting to use of state land for churches.]
Now, I led with that statement because it sums up my point so well. However, it’s become fashionable these days by “Christian Nation” zealots to claim this quote is not actually one of Madison’s. It has been long attributed to him but its provenance is a bit murky or so they now claim. Whoever said it, it is perfectly phrased to express what Madison would no doubt have said himself. I imagine that because it so perfectly also discredits the Holy Conspiracy’s claim that the Founding Fathers never really meant to build what Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church and State, it would be handy for them if he hadn’t said it. I wonder however, why the Holy Conspiracy is so exercised to disprove the validity of this sentiment, when Madison clearly says essentially the same thing repeatedly in a host of other absolutely unquestionable documents:
During almost fifteen centuries, has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution….
–Page 106, Christianity and the Constitution.
Nothwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment
of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov’ & Religion neither can be duly supported…. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov’ will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together; [James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt]
The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. [James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, Dec 3, 1821]
We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. [James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Assemby of Virginia]
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. [James Madison, 1819, in Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State]
Or as George Washington said in 1796 in signing the Treaty of Tripoli:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or
tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” [Emphasis mine.]
Every single Christian Nation eventually rises from it’s own repeatedly brutal self-extermination attempts saying, well, that’s all behind us now, we’ve finally fixed the religion—and then evolves into the same violently repressive culture yet again. Over and over. That is not Our Father in Heaven’s plan for America.
What Cleon Skousen missed, what you’re missing now Glenn Beck, is that the 5000 Year Leap made by the Founding Fathers in 1776, was deliberately and carefully aimed as far from the direction of a Christian Nation as they could launch themselves. Now you and your Holy Conspirators want to jump back into the Christian historical pit of darkness. Enlightenment came to America in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
That’s the great Bait-and-Switch ploy you aren’t seeing Brother Beck.
That’s the Christian Cycle Glenn.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Satan’s Plan.
Glenn.
All Hail the Protestants Part 6: Born in the USA
American religion evolved primarily out of various Anglified variants of Calvinism. Calvin had almost nothing in common with Joseph Smith theologically, though Smith had been brought up on huge doses of Calvinism. Not much of it seemed to have rubbed off however. Calvin’s offshoot sects like the Presbyterians, came to be be Smith’s political and theological arch-enemies.
Calvin was no stranger to persecution of course, but unlike Joseph Smith he quickly learned how to politic himself into a position of power through stirring up the masses and local clergy to support him. He could also argue his way out of the noose when called upon and barely escaped being branded a heretic himself early on. Like Joseph Smith, he was a self-made “Prophet,” only he didn’t believe in those, or a self-declared “Pope” except he didn’t believe in those either. He had no easy credentials, no “Old School Tie” connections to speak of, no inherent money, lands, titles, legal, political or social power base. Everything he built in his Geneva Empire he pulled out of his own arse and had to create on the spot. Calvin literally created his own theocracy and assumed the role of its Protector for Life. To do this he took an urban wilderness apart at the seams and rebuilt it in his own image. With little more than his own big mouth and clever pen, he ousted political, social, and religious authorities who had ruled the “civilized” world for centuries. You can’t knock success.
But John Calvin beat Joe Smith to the New World, and because Calvin’s theocratic descendants knew exactly what Calvin would be doing if he had been the one founding America, American Christians for the most part just presumed from the start that Old Joe Smith would be attempting to pull off the same sort of theocratic dictatorship. Quite apart from doctrinal differences, this political reality in an American system meant that Christians could not let Mormons participate on an even playing field or they could simply recruit and reproduce themselves into political orthodoxy anywhere they established a social power base. That’s far easier to do in America than it is with an official State religion where Christians could easily define Mormonism out of the entire political and social process. That’s what Constantine did. That’s what Calvin did. That’s what virtually every one of the Protestant Reformers did. How even a hugely Christian majority could do the same thing in a Constitutional Republic with specific Constitutional protections for freedom of worship, became a serious frustration for anti-Mormon Christian crusaders.
Christian America’s reaction to Revolutionary Joe Smith has been from the start, primarily a territorial dispute rather than strictly a doctrinal or authoritarian one. Smith was threatening Protestant America’s ownership of the hearts, minds, and bodies of the New World simply by being allowed to exist. The specifics of his doctrines were only relevant insofar as they could be firmly defined as heretical, and that could have come down to anything from denouncing infant baptism, the Triune God, the Inerrancy of the King James Bible, or any number of pet, historically hot Christian controversies, depending upon which Christian clergy was looking to put down Mormonism.
Joseph Smith’s most offensive heresy however, in the minds of the professional Christians offended by it, was the very notion that some rural hick in his pre-teen years could turn whole populations against thousands of years of conventional Christianity based entirely upon a claim to personal revelation. If the general population was somehow willing to accept that premise, then anyone could worship God however they wanted and could establish by public acclaim any new creed or clergy they felt most comfortable with. The professional American Christian clergy would no longer have a captive audience. America’s up-and-coming Christian ministries certainly couldn’t have that sort of competition going on in their expansive, newly planted American fields of self-imagined glory.
America in Joseph Smith’s day represented the largest wide-open potential Christian harvest in the history of the planet. Those who owned the Christian brand at the time saw that if they did not vigorously–even violently–guard its use, it meant that America would become a place where anyone could come up with a more popular twist on the Bible or religion in general, and freely steal their sheep away. They saw that if they were forced by their own Church traditions to insist upon preaching doctrines to, and haranguing their congregations with dogma that generations of thinking Christians have known to be irrational, illogical, and often just plain asinine, they would never be able to compete against somebody free to deliver a gospel that made sense for a change. (Or at least, made more sense.) If Joe Smith were allowed by “inspiration” to say, no, there’s no such thing as immaterial matter, or that God just exists as a finer form of matter, but neither matter nor intelligence can be created nor destroyed, the fact is, unlike the Platonic, Athanasian, non-God that Christians are compelled to defend, an intangible being who is made of nothing and yet fills an infinitely huge universe, which He incidentally created out of nothing, Smith’s version is going to leave the professional Christian with merely a few obtuse apologies centered around murky mysticism, to try to cover up the clear impression most intelligent listeners would get, that Joe Smith makes absolute sense and his notion of God and physics are apparently scientifically valid.
In frontier America, if anyone was going to be fleecing America’s thriving flocks, it was going to be Christians. Professional, properly trained Christians. Even though the professional Christians in America’s revivalist-driven frenzies at the start of the 19th century fought fervently amongst themselves to define what exactly a Christian actually was, or what the word even meant, they were all pretty certain it didn’t include Joe Smith and his Mormons. Ultimately however, Christianity could not find a Constitutional relief from Mormonism. So Christianity went outside the Constitution and invented a form of Holy Retribution that became known as “mobocracy.” Where Calvin would have simply had the lawmen he owned haul Joseph Smith into the courts he owned, and torture a confession out of him after the Church thugs he owned had beaten him senseless enough, and then Calvin could have executed Joe Smith in a public square that he also owned, Calvin’s American children could only effect the same arrangement by assembling masses of Christian clergy and congregational supporters, declaring Joe Smith a heretic in absentia, and then execute their verdict through an embrace of violence and encouragement to the reprobates, low-lifes and back-sliders within their own congregations, or even unfocussed n’er-do-wells loafing around within earshot, to go enjoy whatever wicked pleasure they might gain from tormenting, sacking, pillaging, raping and murdering the Mormons with the blessing of God, and with full assurance that as non-Christian blasphemers and heretics, Mormons are beyond the protection of American justice. (Like Negros and Indians.)
Where Calvin would have had his own lawmen and politicians openly enact and enforce anti-Mormon statutes by force of arms, America’s career Christian religionists generally had to settle for an agreement from their civil officials and officers of the law to look the other way, or just be out of town that day, as the mobs did the dirty work of insuring Christian control over all civic affairs.
Like Joseph Smith, Calvin made beginner’s mistakes that could have ruined him. For instance, because John Calvin was throughout his religious career essentially making it up as he went, claiming the Bible as his and God’s only authority on this earth, one of his first major religious scuffles before coming to undisputable power in Geneva was with a French refugee, Pierre Caroli, a pastor who was a stickler for “orthodoxy.” In his many lectures and tours, Calvin was always imprecise in his Trinitarian and other “orthodox” terminology. The peculiar Calvinist vernacular he invented became a target for detractors who saw that he didn’t have the Latin Church creeds and related jargon down well enough in their minds to be considered reliably schooled in Christianity. In fairness to Calvin, this is because none of it is actually in the Bible.
Caroli accused Calvin of Arianism and Sabellianism, a couple of old anti-Trinitarian “heresies” supposedly long settled in both Roman, Eastern, Lutheran and most other Protestant circles. Caroli’s charges centered around the notion that Calvin never used the word “Trinity,” he used “Godhead,” and his Geneva Church did not formally subscribe to the Athanasian Creed. The Confession of Faith he forced his entire city to swear to didn’t specifically contain any Trinitarian language either. In 1537 Calvin and his cloister of religious consultants were therefore called before the synod in Bern and back-pedaled their way out of the charge of heresy with some effort and then kicked Caroli out of town and permanently banished him.
I’ve always found this brush with heresy on Calvin’s part amusingly hypocritical in light of the fact that some few years later, after ascending to his throne in Geneva, he would be condemning Michael Servetus to the fire for being anti-Trinitarian, the same charge Caroli used to almost get Calvin burned to a crisp. And if I can compare Joseph Smith just once more with John Calvin, we see that Smith’s biggest sin from the professional Christian’s perspective seemed to be that he just didn’t ever seem to play the Christian game by the established rules. Some rules were just not to be questioned, and Trinitarianism was probably the most sacrosanct of them all in either the Roman or mainstream Protestant traditions. If you could prove your critics and opponents were anti-Trinitarian, it was sure-fire trip to the gallows or the stake—or if you were under Calvin’s rule, he seemed to prefer decapitation with a pretty, ceremonial sword he kept around for the purpose. So, just in example, when Calvin recognized his Trinitarian error, he did not say, no Bishop, it’s just not in the Bible so it isn’t true. He said, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and moved on. (He did not however, go back and amend any of his confessions of faith to include Trinitarian language, nor did he append to any of his theological dogma either the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds.)
Unlike Luther and most other Reformers, Calvin skipped out on his Catholic education and was not at all well versed in the traditions of the Church Fathers and their various creeds. In fact when confronted with the writings of the Church Fathers or Apostolic Fathers by opponents or debaters, Calvin would just say he had the “original” Greek manuscripts, he had the Latin and the Hebrew and could read from the original Biblical authors themselves. Sola Scriptura or the Bible Only was his motto. He didn’t care what some minor African bishop like Augustine of Hippo or some Roman Catholic council had to say about the metaphysical character of Deity back in 326 AD. (I 
won’t go again into the fundamental stupidity of his assumption that he had the “original” Biblical texts at his disposal.) He did however have the oldest Greek and Latin texts then in existence, and it could be argued that he would therefore be more reliable in his resources than say, the King James “Authorized Version” is then or now. In fact there is an ongoing battle between modern sects who are essentially Calvinist most of them, who view the King James Version to be absolutely inerrant, and a modern class of scholars who in fact take Calvin’s argument and make it a point to catalogue every single error in this inerrant work, based strictly upon how it differs from the Latin and Greek texts it was allegedly taken from.
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-errors-in-king-james-version-bible.html
http://www.bible.ca/b-kjv-only.htm
http://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today
http://www.raptureready.com/rr-kjvo.html
http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume1/tr.htm
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_bibl.htm
http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html
The King James inerrancy battle should keep you occupied for a day or so browsing the net for links, if you really want to understand the base stupidity of Calvin’s claim that God’s Church and the laws of God can be reliably extracted from what we have left of Canonical scripture whatever the manuscript. And when Joseph Smith came up all non-Trinitarian-ish after his First Vision, it wasn’t anything Calvin hadn’t been accused of long before. When Joseph Smith said the American standard, the King James Bible, wasn’t a perfect representation of the original texts, well, Calvin had already been there and done that. The same group of people bashing Joseph Smith on the head with the King James Version back in the frontier era, today now find that Joseph has rather a lot of support coming from scholars and doctors of divinity, and the intellectual giants of Christianity—just the sort of people his detractors claimed Joseph Smith was not and therefore everyone of letters surely knew with absolute certainty that Smith’ opinions about the King James Version were obviously idiotic.
As it happens, the translator of the first Bible in English, John Wycliffe, never fully documented his texts or processes. Because of this lack of scholarly surety, and the fact that Wycliffe was considered a heretic back when the Roman Church ruled England, and thus the Roman Church had put down his pre-Reformation Reformation, his manuscript and most of his copies were destroyed. After that they were too poisoned to be used by any English scholar as a basis for a new Bible anyway. Wycliffe’s English style was obsolete as well. So, the King James Version draws very heavily upon the work of William Tyndale, who’s Reformational zeal to have the scriptures in the common language drew only inspirationally from Wycliffe. Tyndale is claimed to have used only the Latin Vulgate for reverence, and is claimed to have not had access to older Greek text. The “inerrant” King James Version is therefore actually about three translations into it, Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, Greek to Latin, and then Latin to English, before the King James scribes start their job.
It might be noted that although excommunicated by and politically severed from Rome at the time, Henry VIII wasn’t very keen on
Tyndale for his efforts at making an English Bible for the masses. Henry also felt Tyndale was cheating the texts into a far more radically Protestant context than Henry felt comfortable with. Like most people who argued with Henry VIII, Tyndale was executed shortly after finishing his work. But then, Kings change and so does the Church. By James Ist’s go at the Bible, Tyndale had already done most of the hard work, thus his being inconveniently dead didn’t slow James I down at all. James I and Parliament were all all by then very happily Protestant as hell, so James didn’t mind any of Tyndale’s anti-Roman colorations. He had his team lose any Calvinistic calls to rebel from the king or Church that Tyndale may have put in the margins or allowed to be translated correctly rather than spun to favor the English Crown. Then James had his team more eloquently paraphrase Tyndale’s translation, while cross-referencing it with the ancient texts. They had a go at some Greek or Latin or even Hebrew in emergencies, compared texts back and forth, polished it all up for king and clergy, and James I quickly had himself an excellent version of the Bible in the modern, educated, “King’s English.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale
When John Calvin went at the Bible, he of course had older–and so he maintained a bit erroneously–more reliable texts. He wasn’t even dependent upon a translation. He had access to the oldest texts known in his day. If we concede this is true, then, one must ask, why did he miss the alleged importance of Trinitarian dogma? Calvin’s Humanist education made him quite familiar with the classical Greek logic of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates upon which the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were based. And in fairness to Calvin, when ultimately schooled by Caroli’s little Inquisition he found no intellectual reservations about Trinitarian theology. It’s just that nothing in the Biblical texts ever screamed “Trinity” at Calvin.
To Calvin, Trinitarianism was an extra-Biblical concept upon which he apparently had little or no opinion. Calvin deemed God’s nature of existence or the exact substance of His various manifestations to be fundamentally incomprehensible to the human mind, and irrelevant to the will of God in any case.
Calvin wasn’t preoccupied with knowing the nature of God, just in organizing what His rules were and making people obey them. (Mormons will tell you this is Satan’s plan, but that’s another matter.) Calvin looked at the Bible and Church tradition as a lawyer would, and systematically drew conclusions based entirely upon what he considered to be the most reliable evidence available to him in the Holy Canon.
There is only one other historical document that Calvin claims to have drawn upon in his deliberations of God’s True Will. This is known traditionally as the “Apostle’s Creed.” According to legend, the original of this document was drafted sometime in the vicinity of Christ’s passing from this earth by the Original Apostles. The story goes that they gathered together and each one contributed a portion of their personal gospel knowledge to compile its several statements, or “confessions” of Christian faith.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm
Reliable references to the Apostle’s Creed however, only date back to the time of the Apostolic Fathers, many many years after the death of the Original Apostles. The Apostolic Fathers knew the Original Apostles or close associates of them, and it is possible that it was the Apostolic Fathers who drafted this creed based upon what is now Holy Canon and even from personal memory. Even assuming that it was the Apostolic Fathers and not the Original Apostles who kicked this document off, the Apostle’s Creed, like the Bible, was still clearly never written and published in one complete and “inerrant” edition, because the many well-documented examples of it through the centuries show that it originated as a much simpler document and gradually generated into the form we find it today:
1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:
2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell:
5. The third day he rose again from the dead:
6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:
7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:
8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:
9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:
10. The forgiveness of sins:
1l. The resurrection of the body:
12. And the life everlasting. Amen.
If we concede that this is the oldest and most reliable confession of Christian faith, then Mormons are obviously Christian. No Mormon would have any problem with making any one of these confessions except for a little leeway in what “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” means in actual practice. This Holy Ghost issue mind you, is something the Eastern and Western Church are still arguing about so the murky relationship between the “immaculate” conception of Mary and this Biblical allusion to the Holy Ghost and Mary “hooking up” in some fashion with one manifestation of God or another to effect her virgin impregnation is hardly a settled matter even in the historically “orthodox” Churches. Indeed, there are whole new schools of Protestant Christian scholars who are even comfortable dropping the entire “virgin birth” scenario based upon obvious errors or manipulations of Biblical texts over the ages designed to bolster this theory rather than just translate the actual record.
The truth of the matter is, the important “virgin shall conceive” Biblical prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 actually read, “a young woman shall conceive,” in literal translation from the much older Hebrew texts. The Greek Septuagint version Calvin claimed to be his “original” texts (not!) substituted “virgin” for “young woman.” It’s no great leap to assume then that the Greek scribes who “translated” what we now use as a New Testament likewise beefed up this “virgin birth” claim whenever they came across the New Testament authors’ allusions to Mary’s conception or Christ’s birth–whether it existed in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts they copied from or not. If for no other reason they would have tended to try to keep this theme consistent by revising the thousands of years of records to plug it in where needed—whether they were just promoting this theory on a personal whim or whether it actually was true. (And I remind the reader that the original “original” texts, the so-called “Original Autographs” do not exist today. We have only the alleged copies of these allegedly original documents, made generations later by Christian scholars and historians in Greek etc.)
This is not my main point here, but I can’t resist the urge to point out that the Biblical “virgin birth” scenario also calls into question other Biblical assertions that Christ came through the line of David, which would have to mean his biological father was Joseph, not the “Holy Ghost,” or any possible “orthodox” variant of some cosmic, transcendent, Triune God-Being. The New Testament authors, as good Jews, obviously felt compelled to give us the paternal family tree of Jesus of Nazareth to fulfill the several ancient Messianic prophecies about the House of David. But in the process they blew a rather large hole in the whole “virgin birth” theory.
Some very clever Mormons out there are now chasing their tails around very self-importantly in a testimony-shaking panic, reassuring themselves from their position of higher knowledge, about “clones” and “supernatural genetic transfers” through the priesthood power of the Holy Ghost as God’s Eternal Agent, which they assume would easily explain the whole virgin birth process. A clone however, would be Mary-plus-Mary, clearly excluding Joseph’s patriarchal and priesthood lineage. Supernaturally transferred genetic material through whatever means, Whomever its Agent, would likewise bypass genetic input from Joseph’s patriarchal line. So you High Priest Groups out there in Orem, Springville and Provo just keep working on it. Personally, I’m not sure it matters much to God but if it makes you happy to speculate upon the practical application of Godly reproduction, knock yourselves out. This is the sort of rabidly marginal inbred Utah doctrinal fixations Mormon detractors embrace as a gift.
Clearly I have gone into a serious digression so I’ll just move on…
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html
http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/510316-line-david-contradicts-virgin-birth.html
http://www.gotquestions.org/virgin-or-young-woman.html
http://www.harrington-sites.com/terms.htm
Once again I’m only trying to point out the folly of claiming you can use the Bible and the Bible alone to “prove” what is or isn’t the “truth” with any sort of certainty. If it were that clear, we wouldn’t have hundreds of Christian sects killing themselves off back and forth over basic questions of Christian doctrine for two thousand years, beginning with the question of what is or isn’t “Canon,” what belongs, and what doesn’t belong in the “Bible,” and even the basic matter of exactly how literally this “Bible” is going to be used as a doctrinal guide.
Calvin wasn’t the first to pretend to base his entire theology upon so-called “Biblical Truth.” But Calvin was the first to successfully rid himself of a traditional clergy that would have otherwise bickered and politicked with him over its history and interpretation into some sort of moderation. Calvin was the first to actually sell an entire civilization upon the notion that one guy could deliver God-like Truth and Wisdom just by being clever with the way he gleaned through the Biblical texts.
If you look at the Apostle’s Creed however, and then read the volumes and volumes of Calvin’s own creeds, confessions of faith, and doctrinal theses, you have to conclude that John Calvin gleaned a lot more from the writings of the Biblical authors than those who actually wrote the Bible did. If we assume the Apostle’s Creed was written by the close associates of Jesus Christ within a heartbeat of His being with them personally, and this simple creed, this short statement of faith and brief historical sketch of Christ’s mission is all they thought to pass on to us as a summary of Christian belief, then the results of John Calvin’s deliberations over the Canonical texts show that Calvin had theological ideas that went well beyond the Apostle’s Creed or anything expressly in the Holy Bible itself, whatever its translation.
When Joseph Smith “straightened out” the Bible, he at least had the audacity to claim an angel had told him how to fix it, or that God or Christ or the Holy Spirit or all three at once showed him what the Biblical authors really meant to write instead of what we ended up with. Calvin, on the other hand, like most other Christian dogmatists, rather than revealing great “truths” via direct messages from Deity or other supernatural Powers-that-Be, very clearly drew his “Biblical Truth” from Classical Greek Theism and Western philosophy in general. The rest he admittedly pulled out of his backside with no apologies.
Calvin’s theology comes down to five main points-which incidentally were never written down by himself and presented coherently as five connected points. They were eventually gleaned from his writings and sermons by those wishing to debate him:
Total Depravity:
Sin has affected all parts of man. The heart, emotions, will, mind, and body are all affected by sin. We are completely sinful. We are not as sinful as we could be, but we are completely affected by sin.The doctrine of Total Depravity is derived from scriptures that reveal human character: Man’s heart is evil (Mark 7:21-23) and sick (Jer. 17:9). Man is a slave of sin (Rom. 6:20). He does not seek for God (Rom. 3:10-12). He cannot understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14). He is at enmity with God (Eph. 2:15). And, is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The Calvinist asks the question, “In light of the scriptures that declare man’s true nature as being utterly lost and incapable, how is it possible for anyone to choose or desire God?” The answer is, “He cannot. Therefore God must predestine.”
Calvinism also maintains that because of our fallen nature we are born again not by our own will but God’s will (John 1:12-13); God grants that we believe (Phil. 1:29); faith is the work of God (John 6:28-29); God appoints people to believe (Acts 13:48); and God predestines (Eph. 1:1-11; Rom. 8:29; 9:9-23).
Unconditional Election:
God does not base His election on anything He sees in the individual. He chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will (Eph. 1:4-8; Rom. 9:11) without any consideration of merit within the individual. Nor does God look into the future to see who would pick Him. Also, as some are elected into salvation, others are not (Rom. 9:15, 21).Limited Atonement:
Jesus died only for the elect. Though Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient for all, it was not efficacious for all. Jesus only bore the sins of the elect. Support for this position is drawn from such scriptures as Matt. 26:28 where Jesus died for ‘many’; John 10:11, 15 which say that Jesus died for the sheep (not the goats, per Matt. 25:32-33); John 17:9 where Jesus in prayer interceded for the ones given Him, not those of the entire world; Acts 20:28 and Eph. 5:25-27 which state that the Church was purchased by Christ, not all people; and Isaiah 53:12 which is a prophecy of Jesus’ crucifixion where he would bore the sins of many (not all).Irresistible Grace:
When God calls his elect into salvation, they cannot resist. God offers to all people the gospel message. This is called the external call. But to the elect, God extends an internal call and it cannot be resisted. This call is by the Holy Spirit who works in the hearts and minds of the elect to bring them to repentance and regeneration whereby they willingly and freely come to God. Some of the verses used in support of this teaching are Romans 9:16 where it says that “it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy“; Philippians 2:12-13 where God is said to be the one working salvation in the individual; John 6:28-29 where faith is declared to be the work of God; Acts 13:48 where God appoints people to believe; and John 1:12-13 where being born again is not by man’s will, but by God’s.Perseverance of the Saints:
You cannot lose your salvation. Because the Father has elected, the Son has redeemed, and the Holy Spirit has applied salvation, those thus saved are eternally secure. They are eternally secure in Christ. Some of the verses for this position are John 10:27-28 where Jesus said His sheep will never perish; John 6:47 where salvation is described as everlasting life; Romans 8:1 where it is said we have passed out of judgment; 1 Corinthians 10:13 where God promises to never let us be tempted beyond what we can handle; and Phil. 1:6 where God is the one being faithful to perfect us until the day of Jesus’ return.
Chronologically tag-teaming Calvin was the second major influence upon American frontier religion, the Dutch Reformer Jacobus Arminius. http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Heritage/Arminius.htm Arminius was born a few years before Calvin died and studied under Calvin’s brother-in-law in Geneva. He started his career as a staunch Calvinist Reformer but after a while noticed a few problems with Calvin’s Biblical and logical conclusions. It was mostly Arminius and his followers who started breaking Calvin’s teachings down into the five points he most emphasized because it was those five main points they disagreed with so much.
http://christianity.about.com/od/denominations/a/calvinarminian.htm
http://www.ondoctrine.com/10armini.htm
http://www.tlogical.net/bioarminius.htm
In a nutshell, Arminius came to argue:
- Humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation (see also prevenient grace). They possess free will to accept or reject salvation.
- Salvation is possible only by God’s grace, which cannot be merited.
- No works of human effort can cause or contribute to salvation
- God’s election is conditional on faith in the sacrifice and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
- Christ’s atonement was made on behalf of all people.
- God allows his grace to be resisted by those who freely reject Christ.
- Believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace through persistent, unrepented-of sin.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminianism
Generations later, Arminius’ theology came to be incorporated into the tenets of Baptists, Methodists, the Congregationalists in early New England colonies, the Universalists and Unitarians. Even a few “liberal” Southern Presbyterian congregations allowed some Arminian teachings—much to the chagrin of the Anglican Communion. The Smith family was associated with most of the above, particularly the Congregationalists, Universalists, and Methodists. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife’s family were staunchly Methodist.
it was Arminian theology in particular that fueled the revivalist flames that created Joseph Smith’s so-called “Burned-Over District” in upstate New York. Christ’s “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16) to take the gospel to the world was pretty pointless to the Calvinist, because God, in Calvinism, had already chosen those He was going to save and this election was assured and irresistible, and not based on merit at all anyway. Believe or not believe, confess or be baptized, it didn’t matter in the end. It was really all down to God, not you. The Methodists however, were driven to sell the sinner on the idea of repenting, since they believed it was the sinner’s choice to make. Salvation to the Methodist was dependent first upon you exercising your free will to accept Jesus. And after that, Methodists were also fervently engaged in making sure they didn’t “backslide” and lose their election as they, unlike the Calvinists, believed to be possible.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+28%3A16-20&version=NIV
“Methodist” was originally an epithet used by Oxford students to describe the methodical way founders John
Wesley, a professor there, and his younger brother Charles, had formed a “Holy Club” on campus to organize their lives. George Whitefield soon teamed with Wesley and introduced an animated form of open-air “revival” preaching to their club. Their original intent was a reorganization of the Church of England, but the whole “revivalist” approach infected branches of it to the point that they began to be called “Methodist.”
Wesley was very Arminian but Whitefield gravitated to some seriously Calvinist ideas as their church spread around Scotland and the British Isles, which strained their relationship. It was Whitefield however, who convinced Wesley it was not immoral to preach outside a consecrated church structure and brought the gospel message to all classes high and low, including labor castes who were until then outside the central focus of the Church. That’s not a particularly Calvinist approach mind you, and I can’t really account for Whitefield’s motivation for the populist, egalitarian overview of his Christian mission. Whitefield was instrumental in founding an independent sect called the Free Church of England which ultimately led to an entirely separate 
Methodist church.
Whitefield first brought the notion of revivalism to the American colonies and fired up the First Great Awakening. When Whitefield died, Wesley, who outlived him, was free to take Methodism in an entirely Arminian direction with no further in-fighting from Whitefield. It’s this Arminian message in the Second Great Awakening, Joseph Smith’s time, that set the Methodists apart from the Calvinist pack as something new and exciting. The Methodists opened up the American religious playing field and the rest had to scramble to keep up with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodism
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_methodism.htm
While the Puritans of early America were certainly exposed to the thoughts of all the central Reformationists, including Jacobus Arminius in the Netherlands, Zwingli in Switzerland or even the German primo-heretic Martin Luther, they were addictively attracted to the brutishly simplified teachings and extreme disciplines of Calvin. Calvinists believed prosperity was always an indication of God’s favor, and hardship was always the result of sin and faithlessness. They believed that personal sin could bring God’s punishment upon the whole community and people required constant supervision and chastisement. Conversely, they also believed that hard work and faith was always rewarded by God. These concepts are inherently schizophrenic when objectively reviewed.
Calvin himself professed to believe in the “Priesthood of all Believers,” yet the purest descendants of Calvin’s religious machine, the Presbyterians, count Joseph Smith as an archetypal heretic because he claimed his authority without religious degrees or titles. “Who is this Joe Smith upstart?” they asked when he appeared in the thick of the religious scene of his day, telling them they had it all wrong. My Lutheran ancestors of course asked the same question about Calvin, when he did the same thing to Martin Luther’s followers back in the Old Country. My Lutheran relatives have described Calvin as an impertinent, egocentric despot who never finished a seminary class, never took a vow, and was never ordained by anyone of any authority to teach anything other than Legal Humanism. And that only in French.
Who the hell is Joe Smith? Who the hell is John Calvin? I could fairly reply. Thomas Jefferson asked himself the same question and came to conclusion that Calvin was Satanically inspired fool.
I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
Jefferson, almost as Joseph Smith was kneeling down in the woods to confirm his own dubious assessment, of period Christianity, was also writing this:
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820
For a sample of the philosophical nonsense Jefferson was describing as the Platonistic, the “Classical” or rather, “Pagan” foundation of Calvin’s God, here’s a segment from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online:
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/K113
Regardless of the Biblical translation then, the Reformers and the Protestants, just like their Roman predecessors, were all decoding Biblical texts from their slightly varied but still narrow perspectives as products of a Hellenized, Greco-Roman, Western civilization. From the early Church Fathers and before, Christian scholars, Roman, Eastern, Protestant and Reformers alike have been trying to make Biblical texts support conclusions about the nature of God that Classical philosophers had long taken for granted as logical and thus true. The “Jesus of the Bible” or the “God of the Bible” was invented by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and their Pagan Greek philosophical fellows. The writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were simply jiggered and interpreted hundreds of years later to make them seem to support the established “science” of these Pagan philosophers.
The Church of England’s Westminster Confession of Faith, negotiated in 1646 for example, describes God as “without body parts or passions.” This is a concept of the Supreme Being the Pagan Greeks and other Western philosophers had formulated generations before Constantine and his Nicene Council first codified it into Christian dogma in 326. When you start from this Pagan assumption, and you then examine God’s Biblical dealings with man through the relatively narrow and scarce Biblical texts that have survived, it is very easy to produce the sort of absurd, even cruel and arbitrary God that Calvin invented for himself. And again, in fairness, though Calvin and his fellow Reformationists were all claiming to be using the “Bible Alone!” as their sole source of wisdom, they were in fact also simply plugging generations of written and unwritten base assumptions from the corrupted “Church” they were rebelling from, automatically into Biblical verse. They used base assumptions from their admittedly corrupt “Church Tradition” to fill in the holes and answer questions the Bible itself didn’t even come close to answering.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Creeds.html
Contrary to the Pilgrim’s Puritan claim on America as their ultimate Calvinist free-fire zone, the actual Fathers of the Constitution were some of the first Western philosophers and religionists to actually look at the Bible without preconceptions and allow themselves to evaluate its provenance, historical and literary value dispassionately and realistically—apart from the thousands of years of Christian mythology and the fabled Church histories surrounding it.
Thomas Paine was one of the chief authors and instigators of the American Revolution. Like Jefferson and others in their circle of American visionaries, he had religious notions that drew serious rebuke from most of his Christian countrymen, authoring amongst other works, The Age of Reason, which was called by his detractors, “The Atheist’s Bible.” His main approach illustrated a modern, critical Biblical scholarship that was generations ahead of its time, though common today.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html
Both Paine and Jefferson expressed sentiments that could very easily be put into Joseph Smith’s terms: The Church had fallen apart and the Bible was never intended to be the last word on the subject. In other words, all three of these American patriots were saying that the Church had not been either Providentially preserved from, or inspirationally Reformed from heresy and fatal collapse. The the Bible was never a complete “How To” manual left directly from the pen of Jesus. Christ had never intended to leave a Biblical record in total perfection specifically to save the Church from error, so the boast that mankind didn’t need anything other than the Bible to run society in Christian harmony is ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson even edited his own version of the Bible, removing the parts he said were idiotic or anti-social, illogical, demonic and dangerous to the nation.
Yes, Jefferson was branded by many a heretic. It was a serious detriment to his political aspirations. However, Thomas Jefferson went on to found the nation and became its president in due time. Joseph Smith on the other hand, got shot down like a dog by an angry mob of Christians.
Timing is everything I guess.
And then again, Jefferson never claimed to talk to God and Angels. Jefferson never tried to found his own church and muscle in on Christianity’s piece of the American pie.
All Hail the Protestants Part 2: King Henry VIII
Henry Tudor VIII, King of England, Ireland, Pretender to the French throne, eventual King and uniter of England with Wales, Defender of the Faith, would-be Holy Roman Emperor, was born 28 June 1491. He took his father’s throne on 21 April, 1509, and died 28 January 1547, more-or-less peacefully, and still King of England. In his prime he was a handsome, fit, vigorous sporting man with a healthy wit. Contrary to popular opinion, he was not much of a rake or a lady’s man–unless they were fertile, not too ugly, skilled in childbirth and produced male offspring. The image we most conjure up of him is that of a deteriorated, disturbed, obese, probably syphilitic wreck obsessed almost entirely with providing his throne with a healthy and clear heir. In truth, Henry VIII was probably not syphilitic, and by most standards fairly chaste—with perhaps a couple of exceptions. He mostly had sex only with women he already had in the marriage queue with the intent of bearing him a son.
His plans for an heir were first thwarted in 1502, through his marriage to his older brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. You may coincidentally note that a few years earlier in 1492, when Henry was a year old , these two had sent one Christopher Columbus off to discover an island way the heck down off the Coast of South America. For this random landing, Columbus would get credit as the “discoverer” of “America” for the next five or six centuries. We know now of course, that the Norse, and probably Clan Gunn, Norse descendants from Scotland with some undisclosed Swedish shipmates, along possibly with St. Brendan of Ireland, had repeatedly “discovered” North America over a thousand years previously, and actually hung out at Plymouth Rock and other places where God would lead the “Pilgrims” and seekers of religious freedom at the actual start of “America” as we know it. This probably includes portaging up the St. Lawrence into Duluth and roaming down into the prairies of what is now Minnesota, where my own Lutheran ancestors would end up, also looking for religious and political freedom. I don’t know what that means, but when you start linking historical events together in the context of “God’s Divine Providence,” you can make anything fit into God’s master plan.
Henry became the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England, and his father, Henry VII, figured he needed to reaffirm that his Spanish alliance was cinched up in a tight bundle so he could poke away at France in case a chance to take that throne came up in the mix. Henry VII proposed that his new Heir, Henry VIII should step into the void and take young Catherine as his bride.
In the book of Leviticus, however, is the damning passage: “If a brother is to marry the wife of a brother they will remain childless.” This required a Papal dispensation to remove any doubt as to the validity of the union. To aid this scheme, Catherine claimed her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated–which is almost plausible since she was nearly a child and Arthur was in ill health and barely into puberty. (However, I know what I would have been doing at age 15 had I been given a “wife” and told to produce an heir…)
Catherine’s mother, Queen Isabella I, browbeat Pope Julius II into writing a Papal bull. A little more than a year after her husband’s death, Catherine was then betrothed to Henry VIII–who was just taking on secondary sexual characteristics and probably hadn’t had his voice change yet.
By 1505, Henry VII had gotten bored with the intrigues of a Spanish alliance, and Henry VIII had gotten bored with the notion of marrying Catherine for whatever reason. (Probably do to subsequent wistful options.) He claimed the union had been put together without his consent. Stalling and political maneuvering dragged on until his father died in 1509. One stumbling block to the wedding had to do with Henry VII being a frugal old coot, and he was holding back his huge portion of the wedding dowry. Isabella and company then held back on theirs.
On Henry VII’s death, Henry VIII took his old man’s money, his kingdom, took his Spanish dowry on top of it, and followed the political path of least resistance. He married his betrothed Catherine on 11 June, 1509, at the ripe old age of 17. They were crowned King and Queen of England at Westminster Abbey later that month in a huge, multi-national, fairy-tale wedding. This was the first of a lifetime of huge party blowouts Henry VIII was to throw to enhance his image at home and abroad.
Had this arrangement worked out for Henry VIII the English would have almost certainly remained Roman Catholic, and the Scots and Irish would have, for one, been so much the better for it. American history would have been entirely re-written and events in North America, notably the formation of the United States, would have probably gone in radically different directions.
Even without his evolving marriage issues, there were a great number of political and ostensibly religious arguments Henry VIII had with the Roman Pope at the time. He did however go through three Popes on friendly terms before Henry’s fixation on trying to fix his marital problems bottomed out into his eventual heresy and revolution. For one thing, England only got one Cardinal out of 50 to represent itself in Rome. Far lesser countries, Italy, France, Spain, had coach loads of Cardinals. The English Cardinal had no prospect at all of ever becoming Pope. England was doomed eternally to be ruled in many aspects of law and life right out of OF the Vatican. Henry VIII at one point very quietly put out his name as a candidate for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, ostensibly the political leader of the Roman Catholic world. This office was mostly political but required a blessing from the Pope, his cardinals, and all his councilors at the Vatican. This ambition, again, was ultimately without hope. From the standpoint of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the leaders of its European ruling nations, Henry VIII was only the minor king of an isolated, barbaric Island. He only rated one cardinal, and was all but cut off from European society.
There was also the matter of England’s Papal representative, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey himself.
Henry VIII’s mode of operation was to exploit the genius of others to his own benefit. From his earliest days as king, Henry VIII allowed Wolsey the post of Lord Chancellor, and he ran most of Henry’s government policy until 1529 when he was arrested, tried under some random, conveniently trumped-up charge, and died mysteriously in custody in 1530. (Probably because Henry didn’t feel at that point he could just behead a cardinal without going to hell.) This remained Henry VIII’s general manner of administration throughout his reign.
Henry was educated, insightful, discerning, and in most ways very wise—just managerially lazy. He had up to this point only tended to stay fixed on any given matter of state for brief periods. He preferred to monitor the work of others in this regard, and if they got in his way or created significant problems for him, there was always some way to get rid of them permanently. Unlike his father, Henry VIII was not frugal at all. He was instead a spendthrift who genuinely appreciated fine art, music, craftsmanship, architecture, and all the things a good civilization can bring a very wealthy man. He entertained all of Europe and created gardens and palaces. He hosted sporting contests and spectacles to overwhelm his high-ranking visitors from abroad. Well into his first marriage he remained a conventional, pious family man and a popular king.
In 1516 Pope Julius II declared a League (union to defeat) between the Holy Roman Empire and France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai Julius II wanted the French out of Italy. The French of course, were all Roman Catholics, and the French cardinals some of the most devoted to the Pope. Politically speaking however, the French controlled most of Italy and the Vatican itself. This had grown stifling and unacceptable to the Holy See.
Henry VIII joined in the fun, but unfortunately had to back out of the fight prematurely. This was not due to a dissatisfaction with the notion of liberating the Pope, or lack of military success. It was because the cost of the adventure and the way Cardinal Wolsey had ruthlessly extorted and bled taxes and coerced “loans” from nobles and peasantry alike had soon led to a revolt at home that Henry had to deal with. The League involvement cost Henry VIII a fortune, gained him nothing but a bit of sport, and made hellacious political strife in his kingdom.
As the years went by, Henry came to see that Cardinal Wolsey manipulated English foreign and domestic policy to benefit Wolsey and Rome first and foremost. England’s foreign policy went back and forth between France, Europe, and all around the various sides of the Holy Roman Empire’s quarrels almost at the cardinal’s will, based mostly upon the concerns of the Vatican. By the time King Henry VIII was personally annoyed with him, Wolsey had centralized the English national government and extended the authority of national courts into all local regions of the kingdom. These were courts which Wolsey then essentially dictated according to his personal desires as well. He ran the original Star Chamber. He compelled the rich, the nobles to make loans to the central government to pay for his Pope’s foreign adventure wars, and became the hated enemy of the wealthy of all classes because of his overtly ostentatious living. Wolsey was running foreign and domestic policy and the English legal system at his own pleasure, under direct supervision of Rome.
Eventually, Wolsey’s tax and other compulsory funding sources were all tapped out, and he had to tell the king the treasury was empty. Wolsey’s presentation went something like this: “Gee Sire, I’ve done my best to manage the budget, but you’ve spent years and years in outrageous, unbridled spending, and we’re going to have to do something serious about raising taxes and other income… “
The king’s reaction went something like this: “Hey, why didn’t you mention this before? And what about all those lands and properties and loot you’ve got there? Seems to me you’re richer than I am at this point! And what do you mean my noble peers and the wealthy merchant classes all hate me because they’ve been bled dry and can’t be asked to pay any more in taxes for fear of another revolt and an attempt to dethrone me? What do you mean your fiscal extravagance and stifling taxation has killed my economy and we are now in a major financial depression? I seem to be really shafted here and you seem to be at fault Your Eminence. Hmmm…what do you think I should do about this problem Cardinal?”
By this time Catherine of Aragon had given Henry VIII a male heir. But the child died soon after birth. She had also given birth to a living heir, Mary Tudor I, AKA “Bloody Mary,” who would be so-tagged when she finally gained the throne and brutally undid all the things Henry VIII had eventually done to break away from the Roman Church. (Reversal and retaliation was one of the main problems with Henry VIII’s self-justifying theories regarding a king’s right to rule by God’s manifest will. But let’s not get too far ahead of the story.)
So, coming into 1529, Henry wasn’t happy with merely a female heir. Only a male heir could secure the Tudor dynasty. No Queen had ever ruled England without her reign ending in war, revolt, split political factions and family disaster. Henry began to insist upon another marriage and ordered Wolsey to free him from Catherine, claiming apparently sincerely, that he was cursed by the prophesy in Leviticus.
Now, not only had Wolsey blown the treasury, but England’s lone-duck cardinal found himself unable to cajole, beg, reason or otherwise extort an annulment out of the Vatican. What had been dispensed with had dispensed with–Leviticus or not. Pope’s don’t back up and have a “re-think.” This time Wolsey had no help from Henry’s powerful in-laws in Spain. The situation drove home just how ineffectual Henry’s crummy little cardinal was and how little influence his throne really had with Rome and Europe.
Henry VIII for the most part was a pious man with a sincere respect for the Church, but only in a schizophrenic sort of way. He also knew damned well that the Pope was little more than just another Italian prince and most of his decisions were just as political has Henry’s own. Henry still felt bound by canon law however, and always put some color of “legality” on every move he made, however warped or asinine it clearly looked to anyone else.
By Wolsey’s end-time, Henry VIII had gone through Pope Julius II and on to Pope Leo X, both good allies. Leo X ironically granted him the title “Defender of the Faith,” for a treatise he authored condemning Martin Luther. After Leo X, Rome blinked and lost a short-lived Pope Adrian I, also a good friend to Henry VIII. As his problems with Catherine of Aragon came to head, Henry was by then dealing with Pope Clement VII. Though Henry VIII was out of it by then, the Papal League against France had gone all askew on the Vatican in the meantime and il Papa was up to his cassock in troubles.
Unfortunately for both Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, the key player in this particular Euro-war drama was the very same Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, formerly of Martin Luther’s little burg, still eagerly making trouble for poor brother Martin and his silly Reformation movement. On the latter the Pope, Charles V and Henry VIII might all agree, but Charles V also happened to be the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s suddenly unwanted wife. Charles V also happened to be holding the Pope hostage. Literally.
Henry got into the Papal League early on, but only momentarily diddled around in France to strategically tie up French troops there while the Vatican could be liberated. Charles V on the other hand, dropped all his holdings and business in Germany, Netherlands, and elsewhere, relocated to his Spanish holdings and prepared to take Italy from the French directly. So, the Pope owed Henry VIII almost nothing, but The Holy Roman Emperor and the Queen of Spain combined were openly taking the side of Henry’s unwanted wife and daughter. In fact, by the time Henry VIII was earnestly pissed off at Cardinal Wolsey for not winning over the Pope, it was clear to the Holy See, that what he was seeing was Charles V routing out the French occupation all the way into the Pope’s front porch with no apparent intention to stop, or leave afterward.
It also didn’t help Clement II that he hadn’t been very supportive of Charles V’s election as Emperor. Clement II got to thinking perhaps it was going to be payback time for the Pope in St. Peter’s Square sometime soon if the Emperor had a mind to go that far. He diplomatically waffled back to make inquiry’s of the French, asking a truce essentially, and asking if they would help in protecting the Vatican at least from Emperor Charles VII.
Timing is everything. You’d think an infallible head of the Church would see it coming, but just as Clement II’s wavering allegiance had been noted by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor defeated his last stand of enemy ranks and there was nothing but open, undefended travel between himself and the Vatican.
The assault on Rome took place on 6 May, 1527, ostensibly due to a demand Charles V had made for a personal audience with the Pope. Clement II either refused or did not reply and instead, holed up with the Swiss Guard and the armies of his various cardinals. (Yes, cardinals had personal armies as did the Pope.) The story goes that Charles V’s weary troops decided to storm the imposing, heavily defended Vatican walls and secure an audience for their Emperor with or without Papal consent. They were led by a fine officer and gentleman, one Duke Charles. The Duke as usual, wore his customary bright white uniform to mark himself in the battle for his men. It also made him an easy target. He was rather quickly shot and killed. Philbert of Chalon took command of the Imperial troops. He was not much of an officer, nor was he a gentleman, but he was about all that was left of a ragged and battle-torn Imperial officer corps.
Charles V’s troops had arrived at the Vatican gates after much fighting on the Pope’s behalf, only to be snubbed by the Pope and actually find he’d been making deals with the very French they’d been called in to drive out. The Imperial troops were thus pretty irritated by the time they made it inside the Holy City. Almost the entire Swiss guard was slaughtered on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. A thousand other defenders of the Holy See who’d survived the invasion initially, were soon brutally executed in the square. Pope Clement VII had escaped to safety however. History does not record whether or not he was thinking very much about Cardinal Wolsey’s great legal arguments, or concerning himself at all with Henry VIII’s “Great Matter.”
On May 8, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a personal enemy of Clement VII, trotted into Vatican City, thinking he’d join in the victory and get some revenge directed at the cardinals and the Pope himself. The Vatican’s armies had recently been sent to perform the sacking of his own lands and properties do to some politically inspired Papal orders. When Colonna got inside however, Colonna was so sickened by the ongoing pillage, rape and plunder that he hid out in his palace with his contingent of a peasant army, protected himself and guests, hosting Roman citizens as they fled the carnage and horror outside his walls.
After three days of mayhem, Philibert ordered his troops to cease sacking activities of any and all sorts. Very few of the soldiery even listened to him. Troops loyal to the Pope arrived from various supporters in Italy, but apparently weren’t very enthusiastic about their Papal defense, because they had no luck overcoming the entirely drunken and disorganized Imperial invaders of the Vatican. Instead, they brokered a deal on 6 June, in which Clement VII surrendered and agreed to pay a very large ransom in exchange for his life. He was forced to concede several important lands and properties to the Holy Roman Empire, meaning Charles V.
This bungling of Clement VII killed the Roman Renaissance, seriously weakened the Papacy’s worldwide image of omnipotence, and untied Charles V‘s hands to stifle the Reformation in Germany—particularly via bringing political, financial, and threatened military force against the German princes allied with Luther. It was a bit embarrassing religiously for the Holy Roman Emperor to have taken the Pope prisoner and held him hostage, but politically it worked out swell for Charles V.
About the sack of Rome, Martin Luther remarked:
“Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther” (LW 49:169).
And so it came to be, In the context of all this Holy Roman lunacy and all of England’s domestic problems, that the former autocratic friend and confidant to King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, was arrested and suffered a mysterious death in custody. This not only made Wolsey’s domestic critics happy and deflected blame from the king, but it was a warning to the Pope and to the Roman clergy of England regarding the likely outcome of disagreeing with the king’s desires particularly in “The King’s Great Matter.”
With Wolsey gone, Henry VIII took complete control of everything that went on in his court and kingdom. He chose mostly however, to ignore most of the political squabbles or daily civil matters of ruling his government, and instead pressured and begged one Christian authority after the other for some acceptable way out of his marriage.
One of the solutions to Henry VIII’s problem–speaking of Mormons–was suggested by numerous sources: Divorce may be prohibited Biblically, but there is no such prohibition in the Bible against taking another wife in addition to the one he was having offspring problems with. In fact, his advisors suggested that another wife was the usual Biblical solution to this very issue of getting issue. Furthermore, to make any claim of God’s condemnation of this custom would be to damn all the ancient prophets as adulterers, fornicators or whoremongers. The Old Testament treated this solution as a matter of course and there was nothing in the New Testament that contradicted it. In fact the New Testament genealogy of Christ Himself made Jesus of Nazareth merely a bastard pretender without a valid principle of plural marriage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_Christianity#Reformation_period
Martin Luther in his examination of the issue wrote:
“I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.”
That was just a bit radical for the king’s thinking. It would create diplomatic difficulties with other nations who observed the Roman custom of taking only one fiscally, or politically arranged wife, and then having sex for love or just sex’s sake alone with anyone or anything you wanted in addition to it. (The Roman custom left clear heirs and made stronger unions between royal houses so fewer assassinations would be encouraged.)
For all the brutality to his nemeses, and his historically exaggerated fits of temper, Henry 
VIII was indeed an enlightened, Roman Catholic man. Beyond his self-delusional end-runs around canon law, he was upright and sensitive to the mood of commoners and nobles alike. He understood the nature of how an economy works, and led a fundamental Tudor revolution in English government structure. Thomas Cromwell is often credited as being the actual driving force behind this movement, but Henry, as I say, was very comfortable with turning the reins of his kingdom over to highly competent, highly principled and reasoned delegates–until of course he found they were failing him or heading him in a direction he didn’t want to go.
(Thomas Cromwell is not to be confused with a later Oliver Cromwell, Thomas’ nominal relative by way of a sister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell Oliver was an evil, Calvinist, regicidal bastard and genocidal mass murderer, who violently re-did the viciously brutal un-doing of her father’s reformed Church that Bloody Mary had just thuggishly un-doodled.)
Thomas Cromwell may have been one of the authors of the “king rules by divine right” theory, but he had also conceived of a British commonwealth that included common participation through Parliament. He did not propose that the king surrendered any authority to houses either of commoners or peers in a house of nobles or lords. He explained the arrangement as using this consent of the common man and the noble man as a way to consolidate the king’s power by popular consent.
Thomas Cromwell drifted into Henry VIII’s chief ministership in 1532. It was a symbiotic gravitation toward reform both of government and religion—both of which went to the heart of the king’s “Great Matter.” After a time of functioning like a noble with the very authority of the king himself minus any titles at all, Henry VIII formally appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls, Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, and then on to Lord Great Chamberlain over the king’s household. Though I’m ahead of the story a bit here, he was also granted very high supervisory roles in the Church in England, that were well above his common caste and layman status.
One of the first things Thomas Cromwell helped get out of the harried Pope Clement II, is approval to appoint a
sympathetic cleric to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest Church authority in England–for that moment anyway. Thomas Cranmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cranmer it was believed had assured Henry and Cromwell that he would have no trouble entertaining any arguments they might make for the annulment of his marriage or divorce of his wife. Cranmer had been in fact previously requested an assignment from the crown to take a religious canvass of Church scholars all over Europe seeking insight on the king’s “Great Matter.” Oddly enough, this led Cranmer to traipsing about with the realm of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who, while kidnapping the Pope, was also hunting down Lutherans and the very Reformers Cranmer and team were trying to interview.
Thomas More at that moment was Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. They were all still Roman Catholics mind you, but he too was keen to make this universal Christian scholastic canvas, to take some heat off his own backside. More you may know was a very famous Roman Catholic martyr, who was tortured to death later by Henry VIII because he would not openly acknowledge Henry’s universal authority over the Church in England. While the traditional story is best known via Hollywood’s finest Roman Catholic directors, Thomas More merely suffered the same agonizing death he’d enthusiastically inflicted upon a great many others when he was in a position to make the religious charges against his rivals. More’s deadly removal opened up the post of Lord Chancellor so that the king’s new pal, Thomas Cromwell could take it.
While in Europe’s religious academic centers, Thomas Cranmer discovered in person this thing called “Reformers,” including whole civilizations built on the ideas of Martin Luther. Cranmer found their theories very promising and had many lengthy conversations with them centered upon scripture and Church tradition. While in this process of fraternizing with heretics, Thomas Cromwell and King Henry were selling Cranmer to Clement II. The Pope had no idea what Cranmer’s travels or studies were about. Therefore, being imprisoned and besieged with his own problems, seeing no obvious objections, Clement VII threw Henry VIII a bone and approved of Cranmer’s elevation to Archbishop.
In and out of the Church, Cromwell made many enemies of the rich and noble for rising too quickly above them in the king’s court. Though Cranmer was on his side, the rest of the Church in particular had serious cause to dislike him. What was really going on under the Roman Church’s nose between Cromwell, Cranmer, and their new friend the king, was the English Reformation.
In the parliamentary sessions of 1532, Cromwell had his first go as Chief Minister. He pushed through measures that cut off the main sources of Papal revenue, transferred all Church income to the king, and gave the Church’s legislative powers back to the crown as well. In short, all lands, titles, property and authority was removed from the Church and transferred to the king. The following year he passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals which cut off English legal appeal to Rome—which incidentally meant the English Church could grant an annulment for example, just coincidentally, on its own authority, and nobody could whine to the Vatican about its validity:
Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.
Cromwell used the label “Empire” for England in an innovative manner. Henry VIII was not like a “Holy Roman Emperor.” That was an elected office. Or, an emperor could also claim that title by ruling more than one kingdom. Cromwell’s Act declared England to be an Empire on its own, free from “the authority of any foreign potentates.” England thus declared itself an independent sovereign nation-state no longer under the jurisdiction of the Pope.[10]
Edward Foxe, Cranwell’s close friend had actually coordinated their “Great Matter” research expedition, and their team published Collectanea Satis Copiosa , The Determinations, which gave historical and theological support for the argument that the king exercised supreme jurisdiction within his realm. This didn’t directly make an argument on the annulment issue of course, but it removed Clement II from the debate along with any future Pope, and satisfied themselves at least that they weren’t going to go to hell by telling the Pope to butt out of English life, law, and religion.
Cromwell and Cranmer crafted a very smooth but revolutionary system of events. Archbishop Warham the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury, died in August, 1532. Cranmer was appointed his successor. Cranmer had a few alleged problems like a wife and a few other things, but Clement II was literally the prisoner of Charles V at the time, he had no idea what was coming, and it seemed like it would shut England up for a while. Clement VII signed all the appropriate wavers. On 25 January, 1533, before Cranmer had been consecrated to his post, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his next victim–er–wife, were married by Cranmer in a quiet ceremony. On 15 April 1533, Cranmer received his consecration and officially took his post as Archbishop of Canterbury. On 23 May, parliament, having already forbidden any appeals to Rome on pain of death, declared Henry to be supreme authority in both Church and State. Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid and she was sent packing. On 28 May, Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn valid. On 1June Anne was crowned. On 7 September Anne gave birth to a daughter. (Queen Elizabeth I in the future.) On 11 July 1533, Clement II issued a Bull of excommunication against Henry VIII, King of England, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. This was ignored.
While Cromwell had led the argument to make Henry VIII the head of the English Church. (This was effected by the Act of Supremacy of 1534.) Henry VIII almost immediately delegated the Church powers he thus gained, to Cromwell, making him the new “Vice Regent in Spirituals.” Cromwell then presided over the Dissolution of the Monasteries which began in the winter if 1536. His title morphed into a higher position, Vicar General. This gave him power as the highest judge in all ecclesiastical matters and created himself as a single unifying institution over the then two divisions or provinces of the English Church (Canterbury and York.) For Cranmer’s part, he did not seem to resent this encroachment and looked upon Cromwell as a junior partner and quite the Church scholar. Plus, Cromwell did most of the hard work and Cranmer could keep his head down and out of the politics.
Cromwell created a professional caste of bureaucrats and made the tax system more efficient. He was the architect of the unification of English and Welsh laws, and strengthened the English government of Ireland. He became a patron of English intellectual humanists (not godless secular humanists, but godly clerical humanists) that Cromwell rallied in his promotion of the English Reformation through print, using the printing press as a new communication and teaching tool in a major way for the first time in England.
Thomas Cromwell probably crossed the line with his antagonists both in court and amongst the commoners, when he was created Baron Cromwell on 9 July, 1536, became 300th Knight of the Garter in 1537, and Earl of Essex on 17 April 1540. The peasants thought of him as one of their own…lording it over them. And the lords thought of him as a peasant…lording it over them. Roman Catholics, who had many secret loyalists in court and around the kingdom still, wanted him dead, as did all the Monks and Holy Orders he broke up and seized. The peasants these Church institutions had been feeding and healing and caring for all those centuries, now deprived of any support at all, really really hated him. A popular revolt in fact, ensued after the dissolution of the Monasteries. Very large peasant and middle-class armies were raised and even nobles seemed sympathetic. After much violence, Henry VIII coaxed some 300 representatives of the various unhappy factions into coming down for a meeting of truce and settlement. True to his nature, as they stood in the the meeting, he had them all arrested and killed in grisly ways as a warning to others with similar plans to impede the resolution of his “Great Matter.” There were no further “popular” insurrections under Henry VIII.
I might as well mention that Henry the Eighth had six wives (as if anyone would not know this) and all of these fated marriages followed a fairly common trail way off the happy path to marital bliss, into a hellish home life ending in misery and death. (But then who’s marriage doesn’t eh guys?) He made truce with some, banished some after annulment, those he couldn’t annul, he just killed. When his second try at marriage failed for instance, and Anne Boleyn turned into a shrew he didn’t much like any more, this only accentuated the fact that she couldn’t produce a proper son either. Cromwell, with very little coaxing, supported Henry VIII in disposing of Anne Boleyn and replacing her with Jane Seymour. He engineered charges of treason and had Boleyn’s head chopped off. Seymour died giving birth to the future Edward VI and she was never crowned.
Though he’d gotten his heir, Henry was bored as a single man and so was counseled by Cromwell to marry Anne of Cleves, a princess from the Duchy of Cleves, which is an area in Lutheran Germany. This was arranged sight-unseen upon the word of trusted proponents such as Cromwell. In this coupling, Cromwell hoped to put the English Reformation ball back in play, since he’d just met with a fiasco concerning the publication of the Six Articles.
The Six Articles effort was intended as a new statement of faith cooked up between he and Archbishop Cranmer and some German scholarly supporters they’d invited to England for a convention lasting seven months. In this they painstakingly drafted up six basic beliefs to be proposed for the Anglican Church, centering around Luther’s Confession of Augsburg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg_Confession They were met with staunch resistance from English clerics who wanted to part with Rome alright, but desired to join with the Greek Church, or Eastern Orthodox as it is now called, rather than the upstart Lutherans. Henry VIII was himself still leery of Lutheran ideas, particularly the whole democratic nature of “voting” on things , like the commoners choosing their own beliefs and clergy. Cranmer and Cromwell’s Six Articles went to parliament, and the combined English religious and secular parliamentarians entirely re-wrote the Six Articles into six articles exactly like their Roman Catholic equivalents, under the same title, Six Articles. This was approved unanimously. Henry VIII later wrote The King’s Book defending most of Roman Catholic dogma, including transubstantiation and the Six Articles.
Cranmer did however, eventually start authoring a specific set of uniquely English Church beliefs that were eventually very well received, including his Book of Common Prayer, his 10 Articles, and his 42 Articles, under Edward VII, which tried to be a complete expression of the official faith of the Church of England, and others. Thomas Cranmer was tortured into a retraction of his Reformationist beliefs under the revenge-driven Roman Catholic Mary I, but when released he gradually went back to speaking his true conscience and was executed for it.
When Mary I died at the age of 42 in an angst-filled depression of hysterical pregnancies and other psychotic breaks, her half-sister, the staunchly anti-Catholic Elizabeth I took the throne and published the 39 Articles (of faith) most Mormons think are so relevant to themselves. They aren’t. These primarily distinguish the relationship between the English Church and the Roman Church—having been written after a lot of turmoil and bloodshed to finally settle the whole English/Roman feud. Elizabeth’s 39 Articles most clearly illustrate how the Church of England has chosen to pursue a path of least resistance between its Roman Catholic roots and the Protestant and Reformationist soil in which it first grew.
But again, back in Henry’s time almost no changes were made from Roman Catholic canon or dogma and even his contrived divorces and annulments, his formation of an independent Church State, were all painted in the tones of One Catholic and Universal Church. Even Protestant Reformers, particularly those openly questioning his marital habits, were persecuted under his rule, including the famous John Wycliffe. Henry VIII never even embraced Luther’s whole thesis that the Pope, or certainly the greater Church structure of professional clergy, was invalid. He just side-stepped the issue.
Any hope of actual “Protestant” or “Reformation” activities in Henry VIII’s reign came to a sudden halt when Thomas Cromwell’s Anne of Cleves recommendation became an embarrassing debacle. King Henry finally, frustratedly, mentioned to Cromwell that he had not consummated the marriage, did not care to, and asked if Cromwell could get him out of it legally somehow. His reasons seemed centered upon her crude, repulsive, Germanness. Historical evidence and testimony don’t confirm that she was particularly unattractive however. In any case, Henry apparently felt awkwardly if not perilously stuck in the marriage even if a legal means could be concocted to escape it. It represented an invaluable union with the wealthy and powerful German Protestant Princes, nobles, and merchant classes, who Henry VIII could not afford to insult. They kept Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire at bay. Now that England was a heretical kingdom this was a big consideration. Luckily, knowing which way the wind blew between herself and the king, Cleves confessed that the marriage had never been consummated and Henry gave her money and Anne Boleyn’s old manor house to live quietly out her days away from court.
Cromwell’s opponents, notably the Duke of Norfolk took this moment of Henry’s angst to poison the king’s mind against Cromwell. It’s not entirely certain why Henry went along with Cromwell’s opponents in the court, but on 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell was dragged out of a council meeting and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he remained under a sort of protection by Henry VIII, until his marriage to Anne of Cleves could be wrangled into an annulment without another European war breaking out. This came at great cost politically, financially, and lowered the world prestige of England and King Henry VIII.
Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill 28 July, 1540, essentially as Henry VIII went happily on his way to marry Catherine Howard. Cromwell’s head was boiled and placed on a spike on London Bridge, facing away from the city.
About eight months later, Henry VIII had become wracked with grief and accused his ministers of making false accusations against Cromwell. He bemoaned Cromwell’s execution till the day he died. Edward Hall, a chronicler in the day, recorded this about Cromwell’s downfall:
Many lamented but more rejoiced, and specially such as either had been religious men, or favored religious persons; for they banqueted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that that day had been seven year before; and some fearing lest he should escape, although he were imprisoned, could not be merry. Others who knew nothing but truth by him both lamented him and heartily prayed for him. But this is true that of certain of the clergy he was detestably hated, & specially of such as had borne swynge, and by his means was put from it; for in dead he was a man that in all his doings seemed not to favour any kind of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride of some prelates, which undoubtedly, whatsoever else was the cause of his death, did shorten his life and procured the end that he was brought unto.[17]
Catherine Howard, who Henry VIII called his, “rose without a thorn,” was executed a couple of years later allegedly for adultery, which, in her position of Queen of England, was treason.
I suppose this chapter of Christianity’s development should have been about Thomas Cromwell. Or Thomas Cranmer. But Henry VIII wore the crown, and history gives him all the glory. He did, after all, create the first protestant Nation-State, even if it was little more than Roman Catholicism with an English brand on it’s flank, and an English king wearing the Pope’s hat.
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.
What’s Wrong With Mormonism?
What’s wrong with Mormonism—why that?
It had a catchy ring to it. It’s short and attracts attention. Many of you on both sides of this issue however, are going to be seriously disappointed in my little musings.
There are plenty of anti-Mormon fanatics out there eager to blather about granny’s magic underwear and show you just where Mormons fit into the New World Order, right there along with the Illuminati, the World Jewish Banking Conspiracy, the Insiders, the CFR, and Skull and Boners. Hundreds of professional born-aga
in-again apostate Latter-day Saints roam the anti-Mormon revival circuit, enthusiastically trying to prove it’s all about blood oaths, death squads and temple orgies. At the very least they insist that Mormons aren’t really Christians in an “orthodox” sense, and therefore are still burning in hell even if they do accept Jesus Christ as their savior—and even if the whole Mormon population is as warm and good hearted as they all seem to be on the surface.
In “orthodox” Christian tradition a good heart and pure intent doesn’t count for anything at all. If you don’t run into a Bible and have that “come to Jesus” moment, you’re burning in hell. And of course, it has to be exactly the right Jesus, and the right Bible, no more and no less.
In “orthodox” Christianity, most of the billions of humans who have ever lived now, then or tomorrow, are burning in hell. That’s the whole point of their religion. To them, Mormonism’s “unorthodoxy” doesn’t even have to be particularly indicting for its proponents to be worthy of hell—just slightly off that particular “One True Faith” of the “orthodox” Christian pundit or authority you’re dealing with at any given moment. “Orthodox” Christianity concludes that even the aborted fetus is a natural son of Satan and doomed to be eternally whipped around the Lake of Fire by his little umbilical cord as punishment for just existing.
Now, nobody’s going to admit to actually believing the unborn are inherently evil little bastards and are Satan’s rightful children to claim. It’s not a big selling point nowadays. Not in this day and age, though in the past it was very plainly preached. But the fact is, that’s where “orthodox” Christian theology and two-thousand years of hard-fought Christian dogma inevitably leads if you really believe in it at all. You can’t maintain a serious argument based upon “orthodox” Christian, career-clergy-driven requirements for “salvation,” that also excuses the unborn from the fundamental, orthodox demand that all human kind must first undergo a conversion from a literal child of the devil (via the Church) into an adopted child of Jesus Christ, in order to join Him in the “House of God.”
If Christianity contends that whole continents full of humanity were “preordained” to not be “elect” and have no escape from their rightful inheritance in the House of Hell simply because of an unfortunate, happenstance time and location of birth, you can’t logically, rationally, have the same “Christians” turn around and blow up abortion clinics to save the “innocent unborn.” In “orthodox” Christianity, there are no innocents–born or unborn–who haven’t confessed Christ. End of theology. It’s billed as an absolute truth. Absolute is absolute—however weird and sick and demented the outcome of its application seems to be. We can only have a limited, pathetic human understanding of it. It’s a “mystery.” But in God’s wisdom it is entirely just and fair. Really. Trust us on that, the “orthodox” Christian clergy can only half-heartedly urge, hoping you’re placated long enough to forget about it.
Lest some of you think I’m making this up or exaggerating for effect, let me say this once again: In virtually every sect, schism, denomination and offshoot of all the mainstream, “historical” Christian orders, it is literally taught that by virtue of Adam and Eve’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden, our First Parents became the bonded spiritual and physical children of Satan. Their flesh became unholy. The act of procreation became vile and ungodly. All of their offspring were thereafter born the physical and spiritual children of Satan. All the descendents of Adam and Eve were conceived in sin and born corrupt souls into corrupt bodies and are incapable of good in this, their natural state. A kindly Father in Heaven, a loving and forgiving Jesus Christ, a peaceful Holy Spirit, are none of them the creator of the “innocent unborn,” but the True Lord of all Flesh, the Master of all the Earth, Lucifer, Satan is our natural born creator. He is our Father in Hell, our spiritual and physical master at conception.
The sweetest and most innocent appearing of little children is inherently evil, condemned to hell at conception and incapable of doing good even when doing good. (Or even before being old enough to do anything.) The unsaved, all those anywhere who for any reason have not been formally “born again” by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior, can do nothing God can count as good. Even the good they do is done in the name of Satan, their literal and true father. And there are no exceptions, not for age, ignorance, education, culture or intelligence—including the complete lack thereof. There is no escape clause in Christian “orthodoxy” for location of birth or parentage or social conditions or lack of proximity to any hope of any potential to ever come in contact with anyone or anything that might inform and prompt one to become “born again.” The Christian clergy has worked out a two-thousand-year-old system of apologetics for giving the troubled believer various ways of trying to explain it away, but no real, logical, satisfying explanation. This is because it can’t be explained. It is not rational or just. Sunday School children see through it. Calling this scenario “God’s Divine Wisdom” insults a toddler’s intelligence. But it does scare him into being faithful and trains him early on to not bother asking the scores of similar questions he’ll want to ask through his “Christian” career.
Joe Smith, First Visions, golden plates, seer stones, revelations and personal angelic visits aside–if you compare the Mormon doctrine of baptism by proxy for the dead for instance, to a birthright of being condemned to eternal torment simply because your mommy dropped you out of the womb in the upper Amazon in 1554 instead of London or Paris or New York in 1999, the worst you can say against proxy baptism is it’s a very legalistic solution to the problem. Mormonism has its hard questions to answer, but none of Mormon theology sends you to hell just because you never stumbled upon some lucky missionary who just happened to beat his way through the jungle and find your isolated, remote village at exactly the time you just happened to be around to hear his sales pitch for Jesus in a language you hopefully could understand. Even most self-proclaimed Christians would have to generally agree that their clergy’s historical arguments like, “Election,” or “Pre-Destination,” and the “Doctrine of the Heathen Nations,” intended to rationalize why Almighty God surrenders most of humanity to perpetual pain and butchery in the pit of hell, are far wackier and nonsensical than a boat load of “magic underwear” could hope to be.
“Magic underwear” is at worst silly. “Manifest Destiny” is genocidal.
In one anti-Mormon tact, the Christian will maintain that it’s not worth the risk fooling with Mormonism even out of educational curiosity because one slip from Grace and you’ll be burning in hell even if you’re already saved. In the the next tact, the same Christian will teach that once saved you’re saved no matter what, and Jesus forgives every sin you have committed, every sin you are committing, and every sin you will commit. Except apparently Mormonism.
While eager to denounce Mormon doctrinal folly, Christianity still can’t even deal with the ages old “cheap grace” phenomenon. “Hey, I’m saved now! Great! Thanks guys. See you at the Pearly Gates brothers…” then off to a lifetime of casual sinning and a deathbed repentance. On the one hand, one has to admit it’s a sales-clincher to promise a sure trip to hell without the Church, and guarantee salvation no matter what with it. On the other hand, once you’ve got them in the pews under the understanding that they’ve got a sure seat in paradise, most Christian sects have found it necessary to perpetuate the notion of individual or congregational “backsliding” from Grace and burning in hell anyway. (Even if they don’t technically believe in it.) Many sects just add some mandatory rites, some requisite priestly functions, a lot of highly-billed salvational pageantry, and it keeps the flock from getting too cocky and thinking they’ve no further use for organized religion.
Anti-Mormonists of the Christian persuasion gang up on Mormons under what they often tout as a “universal” banner of “orthodoxy.” What is really implied in these often ridiculous unions is that “orthodoxy” means Christian sects and denominations that openly mock each other in their own sanctuaries and Sunday School classes, can for anti-Mormon purposes call each other “true Christian believers”—even though they still harbor radically opposed doctrinal views about something so basic as the fundamental effect and nature of salvation.
On the “cheap Grace” issue for example, “orthodox” Christians resolve this irreconcilable conflict by the one side arguing that the backsliding or evil-doing Christian could not have been truly born-again. Their equally Christian opponents insist that backsliding from Grace is in fact possible and you have to actively work to remain “saved.” The other side counters that backsliders couldn’t possibly have been truly converted, otherwise they would not be capable of sinning because they would literally be changed, born again, as a new, godly creature. And a third side argues that the born-again Christian is still capable of sinning just fine, but you still can’t backslide and sin your way out of salvation–the ultimate difference between being “saved” and “unsaved” is that a Christian will have his sins forgiven.
Now, most of the general public thinks these fanatical anti-Mormon, anti-“cult” “Christians” are even more loony than the Mormons. But the public doesn’t mind having a good poke at Joe Smith for sheer entertainment purposes anyway. The fact remains that “orthodox” Christianity is dangerously illogical and far more convoluted from a theological perspective than Mormonism could ever aspire to be. The “True Christianity” the professional Christian clergy has been shoving down the throats of their constituent congregations for generations, is more often than not, little more than two-thousand years of religious and political oppression, tyranny, torture, genocide and war in the name of Jesus Christ.
The truth is, most so-called “Christians” when push comes to shove, don’t really believe the core principles of the faith they’ve been indoctrinated into. Most don’t even know them. They just memorize what they have to say and do to get through the service. They don’t need to get too personally involved in the whole religion thing. They just do what their clergy tells them to do. That’s what they pay them for.
And yes, there are the professional Christians who are not openly hostile towards Mormons. They may not be holding mock-the-Mormon parties and passing out a collection plate to finance the war to keep the Mormon hoards in check. They might be as critical of rival “Christian” sects and denominations as they are of the Mormons on many doctrinal fronts. But frankly, the Mormon lay-clergy-based organizational scheme still shoots holes in the hired ecclesiastical gun’s contention that you need to pay a priest to deliver a sermon every Sunday. If the Mormons are conceded to be running a growing, world-wide, multi-billion-dollar religious juggernaut primarily with volunteers from the common body of the church, “orthodox” Christianity’s career clergy must confess themselves to be at least on some level, basically parasites making a buck off of a captive flock too afraid to fire them or leave for fear of burning in hell. The Mormon model is an organizational disagreement too vexing to let slide.
So, again, I’m sure you can find yourself an anti-Mormon blog if that’s what you’re looking for. This isn’t it. You can also find yourself a Mormon “intellectual journal” if that’s your thing. This isn’t that. (I know linking “Mormon” and “intellectual” in the same sentence means you’re inviting a lecture from your bishop concerning the dangers of “philosophizing.”) Think of this as unfiltered insight into Mormon culture and religion and society from a very personal perspective–someone who lives in and out of it on a daily basis with relative ease. This isn’t however, comparative social or religious study in any conventional sense.
If anything, this blog will focus on the time-honored tradition of “speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed,” or in other words: relatively minor or implied criticism of LDS church leadership, organization, and in particular casting doubt upon the universal cultural superiority of the Utah pioneer experience. If you don’t like sarcasm leave now. If you’re not willing to laugh at yourself go sit in the Celestial Room of the nearest temple and have then send in pizza and non-caffeinated soda now and then, so you never have to come out and be with the common folk who use common language to talk about common things. Just stay quietly out of my blog and feel holy about yourself.
If you still believe the church is true, that Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God, that [insert current church president’s name] is a Prophet of God, that your uncle once got shot in the heart at the deer opener but his garments stopped the bullet, that you once paid your tithing instead of the mortgage and a sack of money fell out of an airplane and landed on your porch the next morning, that you were knifed by a mugger on the way home from church and the guy’s blade impaled itself in the temple recommend you’d just interviewed to get and still had in your vest pocket and it saved your life, that bla bla bla and more faith-boasting and fast and testimony meeting braggadocio soon to be a featured in some LDS publication or the other… But still you’re ticked off about a thing or two and wouldn’t mind venting, then: This is the Place.
That pun was intended, and there are many more to come, along with even longer, more convoluted sentences for you spell-check and grammar NAZIS. Oh yea, verily. You’ll easily make me an offender for more than just a word, but also, spelling, punctuation, typographical errors, dangling participles and grammatical license. Not to mention rudeness, smugness, and general pettiness. Better to be a smart ass than a dumb ass. And yes, I like broken sentences. It’s the wave of the future.
In the Mormon camp naturally, the Mormon church can do no wrong. And any wrong it has done is either a lie invented by persecutors and apostates, or the personal fault of some individual Saint who surrendered to worldly guile and corruption. Not that there ever has been any wrongdoing going on in the Mormon church. But just in case you do find some wrongdoing you simply can’t sidestep, excuse, or debunk, it’s still going to be explained by way of the apostasy of some weak Saint–usually because they lost their “testimony” while reading stuff like this here.
If you value your “testimony” stop reading now. And never take a job with the LDS church. Also, if you like sausage don’t ever go to the meatpacking plant and see how it’s made.
In the Mormon mindset questions aren’t often necessary. Mormons believe they are lead by a prophet of God. They have the gift of personal revelation and all they have to do is ask for the true answer to all the questions—even which kind of laundry soap to use and what multi-level marketing scheme to invest in. They believe the Holy Ghost is a constant companion to prod and poke and prompt and goad and cajole, inspire, rule and regulate every level of Mormon society and that it has done so with perfect clarity not just through this current generation, but throughout the church’s institutional lifetime.
The story of the Mormon rise from one obscure New York farm boy’s personal epiphany to a massive multi-national religious empire as told by the faithful, is the tale of a flawless prophetic giant rising from
the common folk to assemble the Kingdom of God on Earth. This inspirational genius lead a humble and obedient body of believers into a new world and founded a great American religion simply to fulfill the demands of deity in total innocence. When Joseph was struck down by a satanically driven mob, the very Mosaic Brigham Young transformed into his fallen predecessor and addressed the crestfallen crowd of believers to prove God’s sanction of his organizational inheritance. Young then led the faithful Saints into the Promised Land. The Holy Land. Zion.
Utah.
Everything from how wide the streets are in Salt Lake City to where they conveniently found room to put the elevators in the Salt Lake temple is directly inspired by God. Mormons don’t have to think. They have the whole program spelled out for them. Hundreds, thousands of years in advance. Mormons are blessed with an ever-increasing stack of LDS canonical scripture and an equally bulging litany of daily prophetic ramblings that are made essentially canonical simply through an ongoing policy of bold assertion from those “General Authorities” authoring it. The typical Mormon really believes the Lord would take LDS leadership out of its place if any one or all of them ever attempted to lead the faithful astray. I mean they believe any or all errant church leadership would be struck dead immediately by some Supreme act. Mormons know this to be true because LDS leadership has told them so. It’s scripture. It’s in all the current literature so there can be no doubt about it.
The “True Blue Mormon” as they are often called now, actually believe that if they don’t break down in tears of spiritual ecstacy reading General Conference summaries out of the Ensign they’re just not in tune with the Holy Ghost. The True Blue Mormon has been told from the pulpit, often in General Conference by General Authorities, by the Prophet Himself, that they should be able to humble their own basic intelligence to the point that listening to the rhetorical equivalent of a recitation of the Salt Lake telephone directory for three hours can be a fulfilling religious experience. Just get in tune with the Spirit. Even a High Councilman’s talk in sacrament meeting can be enlightening they believe, and if you aren’t getting anything out of it that’s all down to you not listening with the Spirit. They know this to be true because that is what the High Councilman’s talk is usually about. So don’t blame him if you fell asleep or thought it was boring. It’s your fault.
When Mormons expound upon the “Great Apostasy” that they believe followed the death of Christ and his apostles in the ancient Church, they often quote grave scriptural warnings about “even the very elect” being deceived. That’s not their “very elect” mind you. When their own prophets tell them Satan can appear even to the “very elect” as an angel of light, Mormons have an idiotic blind spot that allows them to set aside any suggestion that the Latter-day Saints are in fact the very elect to which these scriptures refer. “The Lord’s Anointed” and “Prophets of God” are by definition the “very elect.” You don’t get any more “elect” than that. You would think that when “God’s Chosen” preach warnings to “God’s Chosen” from “God’s Word,” they’d understand they’re talking to themselves about themselves because God specifically named them in the warning. And when we fairly examine the implication of who the “very elect” of the “very elect,” or the most “chosen” of “God’s Chosen,” would have to be, one can only conclude that those scriptures were not written by the finger of Jehovah and preserved for thousands of years to alert the modern Saints about the possibility of their local church janitor going off the rails.
The notion that Biblical and other Mormon scriptural cautioning from God Almighty clearly directed at His own flock has anything to do with them and theirs is beyond Mormon comprehension. For almost two hundred years at this point, their entire system of church government has been all there is between them and a conspiring, evil world out to get them. Mormonism has evolved in an isolated, naive culture that doesn’t even recognize the fact that they haven’t been the majority population of their own state since the early 1980’s. The vile, sinful world they still pretend they’re immune to has surrounded, infiltrated, and essentially usurped them in their own mountain fortress.
Frankly, Salt Lake City is nothing special in the urban paradise department and hasn’t been for a good hundred and fifty years or so. The Wasatch Front has been a haven for the Saints more or less alright, but it’s also been a magnet for all manner of non-Mormon, anti-Mormon, and “Christian” political, military, and religious jackasses from the early days. Even the Baptists and Methodists who followed them out to “civilize” and “save” them made it a point to be sinful, annoying arseholes, and among other things, rub the drinking, whoring dregs of a federal army in their faces just to show the Mormons how forgiving their Jesus is. But the increased exposure to even normal healthy American lifestyles today, only hardens Mormon resolution to ignore and condemn these “external” influences and go to even more extreme measures to insure Mormon “peculiarity.”
Mormons are incapable of seeing what great friends and neighbors Catholics and Lutherans and Muslims or Jews or whoever can be. They don’t see fine, upstanding citizens and neighbors peacefully, cheerfully going about the business of being Catholics and Protestants and Buddhists and whatnot. They just see potential Mormons. They see the only legitimate relationship they can have with their neighbors of good faith is a lifelong series of schemes to convert them plied over and over till they either take their required dunking or tell them to feck off and leave them alone.
Mormons think they’re great Americans. Even the German and French and Italian ones. Even the Russian ones. But the Mormon flock will never put absolute faith in any man, any government, or any ecclesiastical ruling body, except of course whenever and in whatever the “Brethren” tell them to. “When the Prophet speaks, the debate stops,” they say. But then again, if that were true, the Salt Lake Temple would be built out of sandstone and Mormons would still be waiting for it to turn into granite—which was Brigham Young’s original plan. And I suppose we should be grateful some little Danish stonecutter and an immigrant geologist or two had the guts to straightened him out on just exactly how long that transformation would have taken and what geological conditions would be required to effect it.
Today, nobody would have the wherewithal to come up to “The Prophet” from the working, daily Mormon ranks and tell him his temple is designed like a piece of crap. You couldn’t get near him for one thing. And he’d be surrounded by a hundred glad-handing, back-slapping “professional church architects” who knew better right up until the foundation crumbled.
The concept of Papal Infallibility in respect to the Mormon “Prophet” hasn’t really been dealt with properly within the Mormon church. The Mormon desire to sell their program as a pure and God-directed institution is not served by intimating that their church, like all mortal operations, might still be susceptible to normal human screw-ups. In order to promote their leadership as just all that much more valid and divinely led than anyone else’s, they demand an infallible Prophet.
Let go of that “Infallible Pope” claim and you’re pretty much just like anyone else out there. You aren’t going to come off as quite as special as you’re trying to claim you are. People have to start making sense of your religious claims through normal human modes of reasoning. They’ll have to resolve questions through common principles of faith, scripture study, and pondering.
It’s just so much easier for the faithful to believe that Mormons are different from the rest of the Christian world because Jesus personally comes down to a breakfast club in the Salt Lake Temple every morning, sits down to a TV tray in the Holy of Holies with a stack of hotcakes across from the “Prophet,” and casually gives him his daily marching orders. It’s just so much more convenient to not have to worry about thinking and studying and discerning some overlying, unifying sense of logic and right or wrong in the canon and other teachings of the church like a normal human being first—and then trying for a spiritual confirmation. What a shortcut to Eternal Glory it is when all you have to do is pray and emote your baffled, elated soul into lighting up a “burning bosom” and convince yourself that you’re going to the highest of all the high heavens if you just obey, follow, do what you’re told and not worry, not even think about it any more.
What exactly is a Mormon? Recent national media coverage of yet another “Mormon Polygamist Cult” as usual, found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being lumped right in there with long-apostate, excommunicated, and mostly never-were “Mormons” as serial misogynists and child molesters. “They’re all Mormons” corrected one local talk-radio host when his morning crew tried to clarify his application of the term “Mormons” to the zany, funny Amish-hat and bonnet-wearing polygamist characters in the news at that time. He even claimed these crazy “Mormons” were all openly polygamizing just over his back fence when he lived in Salt Lake City and worked as a major TV station personality. But no, they aren’t all “Mormons.” These polygamist cults now so popular on TV aren’t “Mormon” any more than the ELCA convention that recently met locally to authorize openly homosexual pastors are just a bunch of Roman Catholics.
And how much of “Mormonism” or as they would say it, “The Gospel,” is really just provincial, 
Utah culture being hard-sold for adoption around the world as the only way to salvation? For example:
Is the IBM corporate uniform really God’s only acceptable look? Is the “white man’s noose,” the necktie, the outfit Jesus Christ is really coming back in?
If the Glory of God is Intelligence, why then has the LDS church spent going on 200 years hiding out from civilization in a desolate valley, denouncing the combined learning, wisdom, and invention of mankind until now even its own academics in its own universities openly mock intellectualism?
Why design a missionary program through a Madison Avenue advertising agency in which wet-behind-the-ears teenagers stutteringly urge prospective members in affected tones of sincerity, to stop trying to understand things and just pray hard enough that the Spirit overrides any normal curiosity or skepticism—a program targeted at young professional couples with high earning potential, no philosophical or intellectual proclivities, and no significant religious experience? Is it merely that the “target demographic” of the LDS missionary program just happen to be subjects perfect for modeling in your own image and a boost to the coffers? When Mormon scripture demands that a missionary take no thought what to say and instead be led by the spirit, why then has this commandment been ignored and systematically replaced with a memorized shtick that flip-charts and role-plays its way into putting off and turning off anyone with current religious faith and a normal, healthy, intuitive brain in their head?
Why torment the ears of investigators and new converts who might actually appreciate music, with the asinine notion that the mightiest pipe organ in the world must be castrated and half-heartedly noodled with like it was situated in an elevator or a medical waiting room to make it God’s only acceptable musical expression?
Why send a prophet of God out to dedicate the commercial entertainment empire of the Osmond family as if their bland, mop-headed dorkiness was sanctioned by our Lord and Savior Himself? Why assign a personal General Authority to promote, chronicle and market the Osmonds, to present them to the world as if their teen-warblings were officially considered by the LDS church to be virtuous above the lyrical offerings of any other commercial act 
from any dusty little valley in the world? And why then, having taken Gladys Knight under your wing, a bona fide musical legend and genius, by all counts a major coup, would you then abuse her, or more likely, affront God with the notion that she’s just going to have to dumb-down and sing like all the white folk now because that’s the way Mormon Jesus, Wasatch Whitey Jesus demands it?
But you’re not supposed to ask these sorts of questions when you’re a Mormon. You’re not even supposed to have the wits or insight or intuition, or God forbid, the normal healthy cynicism, to come up with questions like this. Just the fact that these thoughts cross your mind suggests that you’re on your way to apostasy. Then one day you’ll actually disagree with somebody in some minor leadership position in the church and whammo—now you’re contending with the “Lord’s anointed.”
It’s going to be a long time before some twelve-year-old kid wanders out of the woods again and tells the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that they’ve got a few things wrong, and God has paid him a visit to help straighten it out.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is run just like Henry Ford ran his first operation: Any color you want, so long as its black. We’re making Model T’s. We’re selling Model T’s. It’s good enough for most people. We can make them cheap, take a good profit, and everyone can afford it. Mormonism is the MacDonald’s of religions—a million franchises and a Big Mac is a Big Mac anywhere you go. The Lord said: “My house is an house of order,” and the order is up in five minutes or less.
If you don’t want to drive a Model T and you don’t like hamburgers, you’re just out of luck. Adjust.
Don’t get me wrong. Many Mormons and even Mormon authorities might even encourage you to explore your doubts or seek answers to your odd questions that nobody else seems to see a problem with. You’re free to pray and ponder and read all the best books of man and God. Take the “gospel” around the block, kick her tires a bit, see how she holds up, so long as you buy the ride at the end of it. Then you have a “testimony,” which means a cute story you can tell one Sunday a month in front of the whole congregation about how you overcame your adversity and found the “Truth.” You can also throw in an update on your gallbladder surgery.
What’s wrong with Mormonism? They’ve been in that damned valley way too long for one thing. Most of the problems arising from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be explained by that alone. They’re under the delusion that they live in Zion. The facts, even their own facts if you can get hold of them, suggest they actually got chased out of Zion because they couldn’t play well with others. Utah is not a reward for Mormonism’s Saintly behavior. It’s their punishment. It’s a bivouac. It’s a big time-out room to which they got sent to calm down and get their act together before they could go back out to the large playground we call planet earth and get along with God’s other children.
Because Mormons fail to see what is clearly written in their own history and scriptures, they continue to nation-build their little intermountain utopia long beyond its usefulness. They expand their desert ethos, invent and propagate faith-promoting cultural stories that tie light, truth, and knowledge inextricably to their exclusive little patch of dirt. Instead of spreading the real gospel, instead of converting the world to the Church of Jesus Christ, they exert most of their efforts selling the world on the virtues of their own personal bunker mentality, or as they pitch it, their “pioneer heritage.”
When Mormons bring their church to you they aren’t gaining anything from you. Except maybe a trophy baptism, another dramatic mission story about how great it felt to save you from yourself, and tithing income. They’re doing you a big favor. They’re giving selfless service to others. What the hell could you possibly have to add to that? You’re not even a Mormon! The concept that they have, or their church has anything to learn from you people isn’t even in their minds. They don’t need to learn anything from you or absorb and assimilate anything about your personal genius or culture or personality. They don’t need your stinking traditions, your wisdom of the ages. They’re giving you theirs–and you’ll damned-well like it. Those are the terms. What’s wrong with you? Why wouldn’t you just drop everything and become an adopted Utahan? I mean Mormon. I mean Latter-day Saint. Eh, what’s the difference anyway? What do you have that’s so great? We’re Called to Serve God Almighty dammit—now shut up and learn! I challenge you to baptism! I dare you! You just pray and get the right answer and we’ll flop all the cards over this very minute and go right to the font with you…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a good hundred years and several generations beyond knowing anything about Christianity. All the early Saints of course, were primarily concerned with making all the same sort of deep and detailed observations and criticisms of historical Christian orthodoxy that I’ve made previously. When they wrote “Church” with a capital “C,” it still meant “The Body of Christ,” and not just their church. Not so today. Mormons think they are Christianity. They have so-called seminaries throughout the state of Utah, across the street from every junior and senior high school where Mormon teens on release time from school spend an hour a day learning about everything but the history of the Christianity. In the “mission field” (anyplace outside the valley) they hold daily early morning seminary training at their meetinghouses for youth before school. And while these eager-to-learn (mostly) bright-eyed youth are told they are learning all about “Church history,” and the “fullness of the restored gospel and the true Church of Jesus Christ,” with a few passing references to the emperor Constantine, a half-hearted back-patting of Martin Luther and a general “hurrah” for the Reformation, it’s all Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, sagebrush, seagulls, and crickets. Many many generations have passed since even most of the Mormon church’s high leadership had or felt it important to have a general knowledge about the Church—the history of Christianity. It’s irrelevant to what they do in Utah, and is openly dismissed as a waste of time even in college-level BYU religion classes. As your BYU professor will point out, you already have the “restored gospel” and a “living Prophet.”
The Mormon church has spent the last two centuries spitting at the world from behind the Wasatch Front. For all their bragging and prophesying and boasting how they’ll preach from every mountain top and convert the world—they only vaguely have any sense that they’re going to have to crawl out from the rocks under which they’ve been hiding these two centuries to do that. Because the world doesn’t look like the bottom of a rock they have no idea how to relate to it. What they’ve decided to do instead is figure out how to sell a really great American western success story to some little guy in Liberia who wouldn’t know Brigham Young from Bill Clinton but wants to be an American in either case. In the past they would have then dragged them back down into the valley with them. Now, when the point of the exercise has been admitted openly to be to not get all their converts to immediately pick up and just emigrate back to Utah with the missionaries who baptized them, the fact is, the Utah church simply doesn’t trust converts in the “mission field” (again, anyplace outside the Wasatch Front) to run the Utah program the Utah way—unless there are a few Mormon corporate gypsies recently graduated from the BYU School of Management around who can be called to leadership positions to insure it.
Most Christian churches struggle with the daily question of whether or not the Church is a hotel for saints, or a hospital for sinners. Mormons have decided that a mere hotel is too dowdy for the Saints and have built and continually expand and glorify an exclusive country club that takes a temple recommend to join and demands 10% of your gross income to maintain just as a base of entry. The purpose of this club is to call out and weed out a world full of equally elite fellows, who in turn call out and weed out more and better candidates, who go on to increase the requirements for membership and narrow the eligibility of potential candidates again and again until only the highest, top-tier of all the most righteous have any place in it.
The question driving LDS recruitment efforts today is not, will this person make a good follower of Jesus Christ–is this a good person? The question driving LDS expansion priorities is, will this person drop everything and become a good Utahan? Will they dress like us? Will they talk like us? Will they learn all our folklore and abandon their own? Will they sing like us? Will they memorize our sacrament talk cliché’s and stop answering back when someone says “good morning brothers and sisters” from the pulpit? Will they promise to not bring foreign musical instruments into sacrament meeting? Are they going to assure us they’ll never wear funny native costumes to church? Will they set aside their two-thousand years of Saints and Prophets and ancestor Martyrs and adopt our two centuries of Mormon anti-Christian, anti-government folk heroes instead? Will they be 100% home teachers? Will they be full tithe payers? Will they keep a current temple recommend? If not, well, then why waste time on them?
What’s wrong with Mormonism?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can no longer distinguish the difference between bringing the world to Christ, and exporting Utah to the world.
