Posts Tagged ‘Secret Constitution’
Mormon Wars Part 6: A Perilous Quirk and a Blunder
If the pro-Fancher witnesses, if even the confessions of the masterminds of the Mountain Meadows Massac
re are reliable at all, it only illustrates that John D Lee, Isaac C Haight, and their assassinating fellows, rather than acting as the instruments of God under the command of His living prophet, were instead tragically engaged in playing out a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian called the “Blessed are the Cheesemakers” sketch.
http://www.amazon.com/Monty-Pythons-Brian-Criterion-Collection/dp/1559409010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLUEMj6cwA
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/depositionofbrigham.htm
The entire sequence of actions taken by the Mormon contingent at Mountain Meadows was what previous military generations would call, “FUBAR,” or a whopping “SNAFU,” or in current military parlance, an epic “Clusterf–k.”
You can read all you want about “Blood Atonement,” in the Journal of Discourses, and to paraphrase Bruce R McConkie, you’ll find that Brigham Young contradicts Brigham Young rather a lot during this period. You can also never assume the scribblers who jotted it down got it entirely right-something noted LDS historian BH Roberts cautions against repeatedly, in even the material he quotes as 
reasonably authoritative. The bold assertion that Brigham Young ordered the Fancher Party destroyed however, based upon “Blood Atonement,” is farcical. For one thing, “Blood Atonement,” even as it existed in the form of smoke billowing out the doctrinal hind-end of Brigham Young, could have only ever applied to temple-endowed members who had committed some crime worthy of the death penalty, and then only in some future, imminent Second Coming scenario. It wouldn’t have applied to anyone in the Fancher Party. And for another, without the treacherous butchery at Mountain Meadows, contemporary journalists and eternal historians would have recorded that Brigham Young stood down the combined might of the US military and political machines, won a bloodless war, and pulled off a public relations coup of epic proportions. Mountain Meadows only ruined that boast for Brigham Young. It put his church at greater risk and plagues it to this day.
A few rather critical qualifiers are always omitted in anti-Mormonists’ fanciful claims about widespread, roving “Blood Atoners” in the early Utah period of Mormonism. First of these, is that Joseph Smith only posed the doctrine to the extent that he claimed that the willful shedding of innocent blood was essentially the same as denying the Holy Ghost—the “Unpardonable Sin” in Mormon theology—and thus the universal atonement and resurrection Graced upon all mankind by the shed blood of Christ was not sufficient to compensate for the overtly willful and deliberately evil nature of that particular sin. Joseph Smith’s conception of the principle can also be related to the notion of knowingly participating in the crucifixion of Chr
ist, the ultimate symbol of innocence. Smith’s implication suggested no guarantee of resurrection without some other additional judgment and penance in the hereafter. Secondly, Brigham Young took this concept a step farther, and proposed that willfully surrendering yourself to the justice of the law in mortality, and laying your own life down as penance, was essentially the only true proof of repentance for such a crime. This of course precludes any possibility of some “Danite” revenge squad slitting your throat involuntarily, by force or coercion, having any connection whatsoever to Brigham Young’s concept of “Blood Atonement.” And lastly, while many inflammatory but entirely out-of-context quotes are invariably cited where Brigham Young warns his sinful congregation that it would be better that their blood be spilt than they be allowed to apostatize and turn against the Saints to destroy them, it is never maintained that apostasy is worthy of death in the here-and-now. In fact, omitted from these scandalous harangues in every case, are the sections where Brigham Young qualifies all references to either apostasy, or heinous sex sins, or “Blood Atonement” by clearly explaining that the penalty of death under these “laws” was once practiced in ancient Biblical times (and he cites many specific examples directly from Old Testament Scripture) and at some future date the Lord will return to reinstate these laws and hold the Saints accountable for their immoral conduct.
Young’s point was: Shape up now or pay later. The Lord is a’comin’. Young’s point was not: Shape up now or I’ll have somebody sneak up, hold you down, and cut your balls off or slit your throat.
http://www.shields-research.org/General/blood_atonement.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_atonement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danite
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/atonement.html
On the other hand, Brigham Young’s rhetoric was often highly over-stated and figurative for purposes of emphasis and drama. His ramblings were usually stream-of-consciousness and if you were not there in the moment a mere transcript accurate though it may or may not be, hardly represents the original effect of delivery to a live audience. Anti-Mormonists and general journalistic idiots deliberately highlight only the most foaming of these statements. But it isn’t the anti-Mormonists and journalistic fools who created the fundamental problem of Brigham Young’s fanatical tone, nor that of his fellow LDS authorities in the heat of the day. But bias and yellow journalism, creative editing and ignorant or deliberately misleading commentary easily exacerbated it. Of course, half of my blushing Utah Mormon readers right there are thinking I’m talking about playing with yourself…which is the other part of the problem. Brigham Young far too often gave the Saints credit for more basic intelligence and discernment than many of them actually possessed. And unlike Joseph Smith, Brigham Young had serious trouble just shutting up and leaving any given topic in its original, pure, simple form:
John T
aylor, the third President of the Church, reported: “Some years ago, in Nauvoo, a gentleman in my hearing, a member of the Legislature, asked Joseph Smith how it was that he was enabled to govern so many people, and to preserve such perfect order; remarking at the same time that it was impossible for them to do it anywhere else. Mr. Smith remarked that it was very easy to do that. ‘How?’ responded the gentleman; ‘to us it is very difficult.’ Mr. Smith replied, ‘I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.’ ”3
Brigham Young, the second President of the Church, reported: “The question was asked a great many times of Joseph Smith, by gentlemen who came to see him and his people, ‘How is it that you can control your people so easily? It appears that they do nothing but what you say; how is it that you can govern them so easily?’ Said he, ‘I do not govern them at all. The Lord has revealed certain principles from the heavens by which we are to live in these latter days. The time is drawing near when the Lord is going to gather out His people from the wicked, and He is going to cut short His work in righteousness, and the principles which He has revealed I have taught to the people and they are trying to live according to them, and they control themselves.’ ”4
Joseph Smith’s answer was a single, witty, concise sentence. Brigham Young babbles his way through a foreboding sermon about the End Times and impending doom before he eventually answers the question. But that’s the way Brigham’s mind worked. At any rate, not so witty, not so concise, and a bit foreboding.
But on another occasion Brigham Young did give his short answer to the question of leading the Saints:
“I have had some people ask me how I manage and control the people,” he once remarked. “I do it by telling them the truth and letting them do just as they have a mind to.”…
http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Repudiated_concepts/Blood_atonement
Concise, yes, but again with a slightly risky spin: Sometimes letting people do just as they have a mind to do is a dangerous proposition. More so, when the “truth” is delivered during perilous times, in a bombastic, frightening rhetorical thunderstorm, that could easily be taken out of context and executed far too immediately and literally than intended. In this respect, Mountain Meadows represents just the sort of total cock-up that arises from Mormonism’s schizophrenic approach to divining what actual Mormon doctrine is or isn’t particularly since the murder of Joseph Smith. The problem at Mountain Meadows was not as often claimed, that the Saints are mind-numbed robots and slaves. Rather, that they really are by-and-large free to do whatever it is they feel the Lord would have them do. Most of the time this leads to moving in big, cumbersome, benign clusters of warm and fuzzy do-gooders. Sometimes, however, individually, or in smaller groups, they simply aren’t singing off the same page as either God or the Brethren.
As Brigham Young put it, regarding his alleged involvement in Mountain Meadows:
There is a gentleman here this afternoon who has said that he knows all about it. If he does, why does he not tell of it; and privately he places the murder upon President Brigham Young? Why do you not testify to what you know before the Courts? If President Young is guilty of any such crime, trace it to him. There are some things that Brigham has said he would do; but has never happened to do them; and that is not all, he prays fervently, to his Father and God that he may never be brought into circumstances to be obliged to shed human blood. He never has yet been brought into such a position. Still, let me find a dog in my bedroom, I would not say that he would be very safe; I hope he will never get there….
…
I do not care about the outsiders hearing this, as their opinion is neither here nor there to me; the Saints, however, are welcome to my views upon this matter. If the outsiders think that I am guilty of the crime, let them trace it to me and prove it on me. If any man, woman or child that ever lived has said that Brigham Young ever counseled them to commit crime of any description, they are liars in the face of heaven. If I am guilty of any such thing, let it be proved on me, and not go sneaking around insinuating that Brigham knows all about it.16
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html#en15
Or you can read what Brigham Young argued directly, during the peace summit between the incoming Governor Cumming, the Army, and the Saints:
I am a man of peace, and not of war…. But friends, should we throw ourselves in the attitude of defense against the advancing columns of the army, it brings hostilities and bloodshed immediately. Let us drop upon this army and crush it in pieces, and it will not end there…. I was in favor of stopping the army last fall, we gained by that means a winter’s quiet…. And again our religion forbids the shedding of blood, and inspires dread of the consequences; and above all things the shedding of innocent blood. We are informed, upon reliable authority, that there are many in that army that do not thirst for out blood—a portion of the soldiers do not want to kill us, and some of the officers do not desire our destruction; so that in coming in contact with those soldiers we would be compelled to put to death those who do not want to kill us, and in this way we might be brought into a position to shed innocent blood, though in justifiable self-defense. Had the administration sent volunteers, who in their hearts desired to murder us, and who enlisted expressly for that purpose, it would have been far different. Should we be compelled to kill them, we would kill those only, who in their hearts had desired to shed out blood, and voluntarily walked twelve hundred miles to accomplish it.”
–Comprehensive History of the Church, Volume 4, pg 430
http://www.yorgalily.org/~yorgasor/church/ComprehensiveHistoryOfTheChurch/hc4.html
The Mountain Meadows travesty was perpetrated by loyal, well-meaning, devout Latter-day Saints, every one of whom claimed he thought he was doing the Lord’s work according to what they understood of the ramblings of their president, prophet and Governor, Brigham Young. Then again, I guess, you can’t put all of th
at down to Brigham Young’s poorly organized, extemporaneous sermonizing habits. In fairness, you don’t have to look very hard in the Bible to find God telling Moses to utterly obliterate whole tribes and societies, man, woman, child, dog, cat and livestock. The catch is, did God tell Brigham Young to wipe out the Fanchers, and in Mosaic fashion, did Brigham Young pass on God’s revealed demands to Isaac C Haight, John D Lee and the other Mormon hit-men at Mountain Meadows? No. Not a shred of solid, legal evidence suggests that. Though John Lee is the only man convicted in the crime, not even he claims he was given any orders of any sort from Brigham Young. Lee says that Isaac Haight told him that it was yet another local Mormon stake president, William Dame, who passed on the authorization to kill off the Fanchers. Dame however, said it was down to Haight. It was in fact, Haight and Dame both who instigated the pissing and moaning session that turned into an assassination squad, not either Lee or Brigham Young.
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/num/31.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_atonement
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leeaccount.html
The alleged Mormon “Danite” bands of Mormon “Avenging Angels,” such as they were, amounted to small-time versions of the Warsaw Regulators or any of the other spontaneous, grass-roots American Regulator Movement so-called “folk heroes.” In fact, the whole model of Brigham Young as an omnipotent, omniscient, cultic master is a failed notion. The existence of Mormon “Regulators” only proves this, because both he and Joseph Smith were outspokenly against mob justice or revenge. Brigham Young war notably on record against the entire concept. Just a few years before Mountain Meadows, there was a little feud between the same Utah Saints and the Utes kicked off by a Mormon settler nosing into an Indian domestic dispute, called the “Walker War.”
Instead of following a conciliatory policy as Young had directed, Mormon settlers responded in brutal kind. A militia unit in Utah County assaulted a Ute camp near Goshen, killing four or five people. At Nephi, on October 2, 1853, after eight or nine Utes came to the fort seeking protection, a group of townspeople slaughtered them “like so many dogs” and then reported the murders as deaths during a skirmish.
Undoubtedly, the murders with the greatest long-range consequence occurred on the early morning of October 26, 1853, when Capt. John W. Gunnison of the Corps of Topographical Engineers and a party of seven had camped on the lower Sevier River in Pahvant territory. The murder of Gunnison and his party by the Pahvants may have come in retaliation for the death of a Pahvant killed by members of a passing wagon train. Alternatively, the deaths–like those of settlers working outside in small parties–may have resulted from their distance because of fortified settlements. More seriously for the Utah settlers, however, anti-Mormons attributed the death to Mormons acting under Brigham Young’s instructions.
http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/thewalkerwar.html
Brigham Young sitting on his allegedly god-like butt in Salt Lake City clearly did not wield absolute control over his flock. His Saints obviously did not always heed even direct orders. And he certainly had no omnipotent control over the Native Americans. And before there ever was a Utah War or a Massacre at Mountain Meadows, anti-Mormonists were wild and eager to blame even the most unrelated and pointless murders, by Indians or anyone else, upon Brigham Young. It fit their narrative. Young was already billed as a murdering tyrant and there had to be examples to “prove” it. It made no difference to the rabid, popular, politically-aligned press if slaughtering Gunnison’s mapping party was entirely counter-productive to Brigham Young’s interest. It was more important to “prove” the Mormons to be wicked savages.
But, yes, of course the Danites existed brother and sister Mormon! They weren’t much to brag about, were hit-and-miss, didn’t last long, and neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young ever had any particular involvement in these clandestine vigilante operations because they both preferred to organize avenging squads of Mormon defenders out in the open with horses, 
grand hats, ceremonial swords and nifty uniforms. When the mostly hyperbolic, mostly mythical Mormon “Danites” ever really were out avenging the blood of the Saints, there was nothing very clandestine about them at all. The were shooting at mobs in full view, telling the bastards just who was doing the shooting and why.
Every settlement of any size all across the United States of America in the early Mormon era had some group of lunk-heads who tagged themselves with some dangerous-sounding gang name, put flour-bags on their heads or dressed like Indians or snuck around and took revenge or put down whatever social ills their local clergy or elected officials told them was threatening their little world. Jackasses in every society inevitably do that sort of thing all on their own. Mountain Meadows was just a variation of the theme, and though the culprits in that vile butchery may have all thought they were doing the Lord’s work, Haight and Lee and Dame and company, were just wingin’ it on the spur of the moment.
The simple, self-interested truth is, Mountain Meadows is a debacle entirely uncharacteristic of Brigham Young’s machinations. If Mountain Meadows had been a Brigham Young operation, and the point was to keep it a secret, I wouldn’t be writing about it today because none of us would have ever heard of Mountain Meadows.
Mountain who? What?
Perry Brocchus, a comrade of the later infamous liar and detested whoremonger, Judge WW Drummond, was a partner with the several “run away officials” who returned to Washington in 1851 to complain about their treatment in Utah Territory. Brocchus in particular, claimed Brigham Young had ordered his assassination. Somehow, in spite of Brigham Young’s orders to kill him, he, and then a few years later Drummond, along with the celebrated fired mail contractor William MF Magraw, and many others in-between, all eluded the allegedly bloodthirsty Mormons surrounding them all the way back to the East to make their protests. Brigham Young referenced Brocchus’ charge, in speaking about press accounts of the judge’s “escape” to the East:
It is true, as it is said in the Report of these officers, if I had crooked my little finger, he would have been used up, but I did not bend it. If I had, the sisters alone felt indignant enough to have chopped him in pieces. I did not, however, do it, but suffered him to fill up the measure of his shame and iniquity until his cup is running over. He was not hurt in the least.19
–Brigham Young, June 19, 1853. Journal of Discourses 1:186-187.
http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_Officials_of_1851
http://familyhistory123.com/haggard/stories_virgin/GREENHALGH_echocanyonwar.htm
Brigham Young probably had a twinkle in his eye that was returned with a grin from his immediate congregation, all knowing full well he was merely poking fun of his marveled omnipotence as boasted by the Eastern press. But you don’t see that in the transcript. It doesn’t read so whimsically years later in naked print. Many other innocent but highly sarcastic comments have come back to haunt his church over the years.
For instance, it is claimed that Young warned Utah Expedition representatives that if it sent an Army to repress his people he would cease to hold back the hand of the Native population, and Mountain Meadows was the execution of this threat. That’s a preposterous interpretation. Rather, Brigham Young had fought for years to establish a peaceful coexistence with the Indians
and all he meant by this warning was that belligerent emigrant trains and an inflammatory army presence would make it impossible for him to continue to justify and defend hostile American Christian incursions into Indian territory. To do so would be endangering his own people. He made this warning two days before the slaughter at Mountain Meadows. The conflict by then had already been engaged for days. Mountain Meadows is over three-hundred miles down the trail from Brigham Young’s office. It is in the middle of nowhere even today. There were no cell towers in 1857. It was a three-day ride one-way with a fast horse and mount-changing stations. Yet reading Young’s warning in 20/20 hindsight, unaware of timelines and distances, it may seem incriminating. He couldn’t however, have possibly known what was going on with the Fancher Party the local Indians or his Mormon satellites in southern Utah, or even that the Fanchers were still in the territory.
The rider who had been dispatched to Brigham Young for specific instructions about the Fanchers, returned two days after the atrocity with this:
President Young’s express message of reply to Haight, dated September 10, arrived in Cedar City two days after the massacre. His letter reported recent news that no U.S. troops would be able to reach the territory before winter. “So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed for our heads,” he wrote.
“In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements,” Young continued, “we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of[.] [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert, on hand and always ready we should also possess ourselves in patience, preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules.”6
Mormonism’s greatest sin in this business, Christianity’s deepest condemnation of the Latter-day Saints in this offense, if the whole truth were told, is that these white Mormons chose to side with the ”red” race over fellow whites. And why not? It makes perfect sense to both Indian and Mormon alike, to team up to eliminate mutual enemies who have sworn to destroy both their ways of life, and repeatedly demonstrated the power and means to do so. Brigham Young, in his 1857 declaration of martial law, noted prominently that the Mormons had found more help and friendship amongst the “savage” Native Americans than they ever found amongst their “own.” This friendly relationship with Native America is one of the first things the entrance of the Utah Expedition deliberately destroyed. The army eventually removed all the local Indians to a system of reservations. Plainly speaking, Mormons, unlike “white” or “Christian” America, counted atrocities committed against the Indians as no less a crime than the abuse of any other human being:
I spoke a harsh word here yesterday with regard to a man who professes to be a Latter-day Saint who has been guilty of killing an innocent Indian. I say today that he is just as much a murderer through killing that Indian, as he would have been had he shot down a white man. To slay an innocent person is murder according to the law of Moses. Not that we believe that the law of Moses should, in all its bearings, be observed by us; but we believe that it has been fulfilled in a great measure with regard to the law of sacrifice. The Lord said to Noah, before the law was given to Moses: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man.” Those who shed the blood of the innocent at the present day will have to pay the penalty here, or come short of receiving the glory and the peace which they anticipate receiving hereafter. This may appear very hard and unreasonable to some.70
–Brigham Young, July 28, 1866. Journal of Discourses 11:263-264
If forced to choose between the forces of “Christian America” and the Native American “savages”—even given small feuds occasionally fought between isolated groups of Mormon settlers and Native parties—the Mormons would likely choose the Native Americans every time:
There came a captain with troops into this city: they were a specimen of the virtue and morality of the United States. They came here and began to insult the people, and then tried to cover up their wickedness by the dignity of Uncle Samdom. Passing along, they came to a lone house, and there undertook to ravish a woman in open daylight; and the brother who interfered to prevent this villainous outrage was most shamefully maltreated by them, and got some of his bones broken. After this outrage, the officers of the company were soon told that if they did not take their troops out of the city, the “Mormons” would cut all their damned throats; and that was the last we had of them here.69
–George A. Smith, August 2, 1857. Journal of Discourses 5:109
Now, all this tough, vigilante talk from Mormon leadership was nothing to do with “Blood Atonement.” It was
the wild west. And for all of it, there was really only one clearly documentable case of “vigilante” retribution attributable to significant LDS authority apart from the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That was the case of Bishop Warren S. Snow and his admitted victim, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Lewis. His champions claim he was only guilty of wanting to marry a young woman that was desired by this older bishop as a plural wife. What really happened however, was that a party of highly offended Mormons, led by a rather bitter local bishop, intercepted this convicted rapist while being transported to prison, and aided by friends and family of his victim, performed a rather unpleasant surgical castration. But again, that was pretty much a standard practice in the old west. There is a rumor of another similar incident later on, but it is only vaguely documented, and may be the same incident repeated with a later date tacked on as an urban legend. In that case the victim was alleged to have been convicted of incest, resulting in a similar response from friends and relatives. These friends and relatives on both cases of course, are retold as “Danites” under orders of Brigham Young. Castrating sexual criminals however, has not the slightest thing to do with “Blood Atonement.” Not even vaguely. It’s just good old vengeance.
http://en.fairmormon.org/Utah/Crime_and_violence/Castration_in_the_1800′s
John D Lee of course, gave reams of testimony in court, and combined with his journal, proceeded to attribute every single unsolved murder in the territory for years to Mormon “Blood Atonement,” including the incidents alleged above. He and his fellow paranoids consistently allude to disappearances, and people who may have just left the state, as victims of Danite death squads.
One alleged incident that may have some merit:
“Rasmos Anderson was a Danish man who came to Utah… He had married a widow lady somewhat older than himself… At one of the meetings during the reformation Anderson and his step-daughter confessed that they had committed adultery… they were rebaptized and received into full membership. They were then placed under covenant that if they again committed adultery, Anderson should suffer death. Soon after this a charge was laid against Anderson before the Council, accusing him of adultery with his step-daughter. This Council was composed of Klingensmith and his two counselors; it was the Bishop’s Council. Without giving Anderson any chance to defend himself or make a statement, the Council voted that Anderson must die for violating his covenants. Klingensmith went to Anderson and notified him that the orders were that he must die by having his throat cut, so that the running of his blood would atone for his sins. Anderson, being a firm believer in the doctrines and teachings of the Mormon Church, made no objections… His wife was ordered to prepare a suit of clean clothing, in which to have her husband buried… she being directed to tell those who should inquire after her husband that he had gone to California.
“Klingensmith, James Haslem, Daniel McFarland and John M. Higbee dug a grave in the field near Cedar City, and that night, about 12 o’clock, went to Anderson’s house and ordered him to make ready to obey Council. Anderson got up… and without a word of remonstrance accompanied those that he believed were carrying out the will of the “Almighty God.” They went to the place where the grave was prepared; Anderson knelt upon the side of the grave and prayed. Klingensmith and his company then cut Anderson’s throat from ear to ear and held him so that his blood ran into the grave.
“As soon as he was dead they dressed him in his clean clothes, threw him into the grave and buried him. They then carried his bloody clothing back to his family, and gave them to his wife to wash… She obeyed their orders…. Anderson was killed just before the Mountain Meadows massacre. The killing of Anderson was then considered a religious duty and a just act. It was justified by all the people, for they were bound by the same covenants, and the least word of objection to thus treating the man who had broken his covenant would have brought the same fate upon the person who was so foolish as to raise his voice against any act committed by order of the Church authorities.”
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/atonement.html
As a point of order, a local Mormon bishop is not the ranking ecclesiastical authority relative to any endowed or “covenanted” member. In fact, the church is lousy with bishops. They practically sweep them up off the streets, shovel them into a suit and tie, work them a while, and then trade them out every few years for another. A bishop’s court has no authority even to disfellowship or excommunicate a Melchizedek Priesthood holder as Anderson would have to have been. A bishop is merely an entirely untrained, unpaid parish priest in the Mormon system of church government who largely administers the temporal functions of a local meetinghouse and attendant “ward” or district. A stake president, also unpaid and uneducated by any accredited religious regimen, something of an “archbishop,” as the presiding high priest in the equivalent of a Mormon “diocese,” and a court of the stake’s High Council would have to be called to put any Melchizedek priesthood holder on trial for anything, much less incest, adultery, or slitting his throat. And of course, testimony and witnesses are required unless the accused refuses them. The whole system is run by volunteers in any case.
When investigated, stories like these always sound a bit “off” and start with a few internal irregularities. In the end they usually reveal that the evidence is always in the possession of someone else at some other location, or “stifled” by the “Danites” and thus unavailable. In this case, the whole “court” procedure and order is wrong, and no other witness, no grave, no rotted corpse was ever found or dug up. Anderson may have simply just “R-U-N-N-O-F-T” to California after repeatedly committing incest with his wife’s daughter—perhaps to avoid a castration, ball-busting, or similar testicular retribution from friends or relatives of the bride. Or, as Lee insists, he and his friends in southern Utah may have just been that stupid and they actually did slit his incestuous throat with his own permission. But it remains inescapably, that John Lee told and wrote and spread this and many other stories for years and years and remained remarkably un-murdered by Danite assassins. A host of other witnesses at his two trials als
o exposed the whole messy business of Mountain Meadows and much more, and also remained notably un-“Blood Atoned.”
Multiple generations of anti-Mormonists have “exposed” every “secret” plot, scheme, murder, treachery and intrigue of the LDS faith and the Mormon church. Why is it then, that none of these prime subjects for summary “Blood Atonement,” revenge and Danite silencing, ever get silenced? Why does it always turn out to be some rapist, or flim-flam artist, or serial adulterist and fornicator who ends up with his balls hacked off or his throat slit instead? Why is it always some cad with gambling debts, a severe drinking problem, a police jacket for felonious and usually violent crimes, who gets pointed to as the “victim” of Mormon assassination? Seems like the Danites and the Avenging Angels over these many generations have wasted a lot of time and energy on singular arseholes and strictly personal issues that don’t really matter a damn to the church or nation as a whole. Seems like Danites ironically go out of their way to ignore all the very mouthiest, secret-spilling, slander and libel masters of the nation’s anti-Mormonist trade. It seems like Mormon Avenging Angels just have no interest in the prime enemies of Mormonism–culprits you would think that any good Danite assassin would be happily murdering on a regular basis.
Now, John Lee is a cold blooded mass-murderer by his own confession. Anti-Mormonists somehow have no end of affection for anything he has to say however. They say he’s just a scapegoat. Did I mention that John Lee was not convicted by Brigham Young’s High Council? It was the United States Judicial System that nailed him. It was a very biased, anti-Mormon, US Army-protected and enforced Federal Court. It was run by federally appointed Christians, not Mormons. It was a court Washington had initially been perfectly happy never to convene and would not have ever done so had Brigham Young not repeatedly encouraged the investigation. Did I mention that in spite of Lee and many others, including the entire panel of federal judges, the army, and every Gentile in the territory, desperately wanting to incriminate Brigham Young, they succeeded in doing nothing of the sort by any shred of legal standard. And did I mention that this was due to Lee in particular testifying that Brigham Young could not have known anything about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or any Mormon involvement in it before-the fact?
Sure, there were probably vigilante justice squads and lynch mobs and plenty of Mormons who wreaked homespun justice upon the convicted guilty and even the very suspected guilty of Utah territory. But only at a rate 10% of what was going on in the surrounding frontier West. Some years later, at a time when Mormons had essentially no vote or office or any role in civil government or the court systems by federal legislation, Mormons under empirical analysis, were found to have committed only a fraction of the demonstrable crimes that were being committed wholesale by “civilized” and “Christian” America in the same territory:
We are, as I have said, represented as a very bad people, and I want to show a comparison between us and our reformers, or those that profess to be our reformers in relation to these matters…”At the above estimate of population the ratio or percentage would be one prisoner to every 10,000 Mormons, or one hundredth of one per cent, and of the Gentiles one convict in every 909, or about one ninth of one per cent.” So that the actual proportion of criminals is more than ten times greater among the Gentiles of Utah, with the above very liberal estimate, than among the Mormons. It is urged that these non-Mormon prisoners are not a fair representation of the average of crime throughout the country, but are the result of the flow of the desperate classes westward to the borders of civilization; with greater truth we reply that the Mormon prisoners are not representatives of Mormonism, nor the results of Mormonism, but of the consequences of a departure from Mormon principles; and of the 13 prisoners classed as “Mormons,” the greater portion were only so by family connection or association…As I have said before, if we were not on the defensive in this case, I would say nothing about these things; but it ill becomes men who have got ten criminals to our one to come here as our reformers, and try to disfranchise men who are ten times as good as they are. These are facts that are not of my getting up. They come from the public records and can be verified by the prison and other statistics. And the question is, how much of that rule do we want here?52
–John Taylor, October 6, 1884. Journal of Discourses 25:314
The looking glass of history indeed, exposes Mormonism’s Christian “civilizers” as Utah Territory’s primary evildoers:
James Buchanan did all he could do, and when he found he could do nothing, he sent a pardon here. What did he pardon us for? He was the man that had transgressed the laws, and had trampled the Constitution of the United States under his feet. We had neither transgressed against the one nor violated the other. But we did receive his pardon, you know, and when they find out they can do nothing they will be sending on their pardons again… There is not much danger, however, from that quarter. But are they not sending troops on here? Yes; and they will have plenty for them to do. Eleven thousand were ordered here by James Buchanan; seven thousand arrived, and about ten thousand hangers on—gamblers, thieves, and so forth. It made a pretty good army, but what did they accomplish? They used one another up. I recollect in the days of Camp Floyd it was thought nothing of to hear every morning to two or three men being killed; but now, if one is killed about once in six months all hell is on the move. If the whisky drinkers and gamblers who were here to winter, were to go to work, and kill off a few of themselves every night, it would stop all excitement about killing. What would be said if the United States mail were robbed in this neighborhood, as it is east, west, and north of this city every few weeks? It would be thought that we were becoming civilized; but in the absence of frequent deeds of this character, whenever a scoundrel meets with his just deserts here, there is a great outcry raised.74
–Brigham Young, February 10, 1867. Journal of Discourses 11:323
Mormon Wars Part 5: Rumors of Rumors of War
I don’t mean to be crude, I’m just instinctively good at it. I don’t mean to piss people off, but it does come 
naturally. If I wanted to, I could turn tables on the anti-Mormonists and take the show on the road, fighting fire with fire. I could set the Inquisition and Calvin’s Geneva to music, sing and dance around, mocking the thousands of years of Christian torture, gore, and warfare. I could do it all dressed in silly hats and funny costumes like a pope or a puritan. That’s exactly what Christian America has bee
n doing to Mormonism since its birth, and I mean literally that and worse. While the same Christians, many of them anyway, would be shocked and embarrassed at the same sort of open and utter contempt directed at gays, or Native Americans, or Catholics, or other ethnic or religious minorities, they think nothing when they or any of their fellows squat down and dump any volume or variety of crap all over the Mormons. Accepting at face value that Mormons are somehow uniquely weird or particularly dangerous is to this day still a national 
bias still sanctioned by federal law.
One of the first crusading, “Christian” federal authorities to impose himself upon the Mormon community by law and force of arms was one Judge John Cradlebaugh, a federalist, Christian reformer, who rode out with Johnston’s army in the Utah War of 1857, and set up shop in Provo. He immediately used the nearby US army to facilitate his desire to convict Brigham Young of masterminding the Mountain Meadows Massacre–as soon as he heard about it. Naturally, neither he nor anyone else at the time knew anything about what really went on, but in his mind it all had to be down to Brigham Young and so that’s all that mattered. Instead of hanging Mormon
ism however, Cradlebaugh was back-handed by the incoming Christian governor Alfred Cumming for causing trouble and over-stepping his authority. He was also reprimanded by the US Attorney General for terrorizing witnesses and juries by military force. Notwithstanding the friendly disposition of the new, certifiably Christian governor himself, the press of the day, inextricably linked to party-loyal political advocacy, preferred Cradlebaugh’s burlesque version of life under Mormonism:
DAILY CLEVELAND HERALD.
Vol. XXVI. Cleveland, Ohio, Sat., March 24, 1860. No. 71.
Judge Cradlebaugh on Mormonism
One of the Judges of the Territory of Utah is the Hon. John Cradlebaugh of Circleville. He was sent out by Mr. Buchanan at the time Gov. Cumming went out. The Governor turned Mormon, opposed the Judges in their efforts to ferret out Mormon crimes, and the Judiciary were powerless. The Administration sides with Governor Cumming.
Judge Cradlebaugh lately delivered a lecture at Circleville upon Mormonism. We make an extract:
…The little education the children get consists in preparing them for the reception of polygamy. So at variance is that practice with all the instincts of humanity that it has to be pressed upon the people with great assiduity as a part of their religious duty. To prepare the women for the reception of the revolting practice it is necessary to brutalize them by destroying their modesty. The sentiment of love is ridiculed, cavalier gallantry and attentions are laughed at; the emblematic devices of lovers and the winning kindness that with us they dote on are hooted at in Utah. The lesson they are taught, and that is inculcated above all others, is “increase and multiply,” in order that Zion may be filled. The young people are familiarized to indecent exposures of all kinds; the Mormons call their wives their cattle; they choose them pretty much as they choose their cattle; and that great pibk of delicacy, Heber C. Kimball, the next in prominence, as also the next in sin, to Young, calls his women his cows.
…The reverend Mormon bishops, apostles, and the presidents of stakes have as many as they desire, and it is a common thing to see these hoary-headed old Turks surrounded by a troop of robust young wives. The common people take as many as they can support, and it is not uncommon to see a house with but two rooms inhabited by a man, his half-dozen of wives, and a proportionate number of children, like rabbits in a warren, and resembling very much the happy family that we read of — the prairie dog, the owl, and the rabbit. Incest is common….
The ill-assorted children — the offspring of one father and many mothers — run about like so many wild animals. The first thing they do, after learning vulgarity, is to wear a leather belt with a butcher-knife stuck in it; and the next is to steal from the Gentiles; then to ride animals; and as soon as they can, “by hook or by crook,” get a horse, a pair of jingling Mexican spurs and a revolver, they are then Mormon cavaliers, and are fit to steal, rob, and murder emigrants. The women and girls are coarse, masculine and uneducated, and are mostly drafted from the lowest stages of society. It is but seldom you meet handsome or attractive women among them.
…Women that are young and pretty are greedily caught up by the apostles and dignitaries to swell their harems, while the old and ugly are left to care for themselves, or sometimes the prophet forces them on a reluctant husband, that he may avail himself of their labor.
Cradlebaugh’s depiction of plural marriage was vigorously contradicted not only by the Christian governor he followed out 
to Utah, but a host of other visiting dignitaries and journalists. Cradlebaugh’s testimony however, validated the US government’s united effort to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It rationalized the administration’s controversial decision to send a huge military body to force “civilization” upon the Mormons. Governor Cumming’s testimony on the other hand, made the Buchanan administration and all who supported the Utah Expedition look like bigoted idiots. Easily fixed: Cumming is quickly labeled a turncoat, thus invalidating anything further he might have to say about it.
(When you’re on a witch hunt, it’s always easy to exclude any witness who’s testimony would vindicate the old biddy you want to light up like a Roman candle, by pointing dramatically to the witness and claiming you saw them talking to Satan in the form of their pet kitty or that you saw them transform into a barnyard animal or something.)
The whole Christian recruitment shtick is built around frightening you into signing up. Then frightening you into paying up. Then frightening you into eliminating all of your clergy’s competition so there are no other options out there capable of soliciting your membership and guaranteeing you a heavenly reward. Otherwise: Hell awaits.
In the spring of 1857, it became obvious to Christian America that there was a rapidly growing, attractive, 
viable, openly blossoming alternative to their national Christian program. It wasn’t scary enough just to say that the Utah Mormons were all fat and happy, but even so, it was still pretty crappy trying to live out there if you weren’t one of them because they make you feel all left-out and that hurts your feelings. The Mormons had to be seen as miserable wretches living like animals. If there weren’t any tangible social consequences to following a living prophet, or taking multiple wives, well, Christian America didn’t really have a case against Mormonism, and no excuse to butt into their business. The prophet had to be despotic and the institution of plural marriage had to be inherently depraved. That was the narrative they had contrived and that was what they needed to sell to the American public.
By 1857, after three decades of trumping up whole states, whole regions full of violent, Mormon-killing mobs via a strategy of non-stop mockery, slander, bold assertion, rumor and innuendo, Christian America as an entire nation called an open war upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Christian America shouted from the presses and the pulpits that the federal government must eradicate Mormonism instantly, before the entire nation was at Brigham Young’s evil mercy. The more Christian they were, the more the American citizenry believed in the urgency of exterminating Mormonism.
But still, the political and religious classes had to provide this anxious public with a convincing pretext out of which they would appear to organically trigger the sort of overwhelming force and violence required to get the job of Mormon extermination done once and for all. The Christian Movers and Shakers of the American expansion didn’t want to teach the Mormons a lesson, or “contain” the festering Mormon influence upon America’s frontier development. They 
wanted to be rid of them. Period. And to this end, America’s collective conscience had to be perfectly satisfied that the Mormons really, really had it coming.
It had been hoped after their regional expulsion from the Midwest, that the Mormons would straggle their sorry arses out into no-man’s land, piddle their life’s-blood away into the barren, infertile desert, and soon be sucked dry, only to crumble into piles of their own dust. Christian America would then eventually get around to over-running the waning remnants of Mormonism by sheer force of numbers until the survivors were sufficiently diluted to become politically and socially insignificant—like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Charismatics, and other goofy Christian deviants.
Life did not work according to that plan.
Ten years into what Christian America had imagined would be a hopeless, leaderless, gasping Mormon failure in the desert, quite the reverse was happening. Mormonism was thriving and spreading its culture all across the Intermountain West. Mormonism was converting Europe, proselytizing the cities and farms of Canada and Eastern America. Mormonism was bringing enthusiastic capitalists and cultural diversity by the thousands and tens of thousands into America’s Great Basin. There, Brigham Young was daily transforming these foreigners, American oddballs, dissidents, and former Christians, into productive, patriotic Americans—Americans who rather than look at Mormonism as a threat to the exclusive whims of a Christian Nation, saw their new church, its doctrines and leadership, as the foremost protector of Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness regardless of race, creed, or color.
Christian America couldn’t allow that to go on for very long.
Christian America had spent years inventing legends and rumors of the corrupt, oppressive misbehavior of Brigham Young. An entire class of anti-Mormon literature, newspapers, journals and periodicals, had dedicated itself to the illumination of Brigham Young’s Utah “hell on earth,” and the depravity of his closed, secretive Mormon Empire. Nothing they said or did against the LDS scoundrels however, seemed to prohibit thousands upon thousands of emigrants, Mormon, Gentile, foreign and domestic, from making the exodus out of the teaming crapholes of the Old World and America’s East, and into the fresh, open Mormon territory in the West.
Though quite prepared to believe almost anything said against the puffed-up, conniving Mormon fiend who had appropriated Joe Smith’s bunch of dangerous heretics, for the most part Gentile settlers in the Mormon West found that Brigham Young was not cooperating with the sinister depiction given him by his Eastern critics. No 
concrete examples of his black thuggery seemed to leap immediately forward to prove their point. To the contrary, many noted scholars and Eastern journalists also roamed freely throughout Utah Territory, up and down the streets of Salt Lake City, and most of these expected to be immediately struck by the beastly spectacle of vile conditions and heinous oppression that Mormon detractors had promised them back East. To the contrary, of the general condition of Mormon society, these professional observers conceded, often reluctantly, with suspicion, incredulity, resignation and disappointment dripping from their pens, that as the Great Gary Keillor boasts of his fictional home town of Lake Wobegon, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
In the new Utah Mormon society, Brigham Young in all fairness,
had a pervasive influence over what everyone thought about everything simply because everyone respected his opinions. Once again, this voluntary association and resulting solid Mormon voting block was unassailable in Constitutional terms. The Mormon church may have effectively infiltrated every element of law and civil government, but that was mostly because almost everyone in Utah Territory was a member of it, in the same fashion that Roman 
Catholics seem to “infiltrate” and dominate everything in Italy, or Spain, or Mexico. If Utah courts were stacked with Mormon juries and Mormon officers, it was because the criminals and everyone else there were also nearly all Mormons.
In frustration, in the spring of 1857, a few of Mormonism’s enemies in Utah, ran back to Washington DC making the bold assertion that Brigham Young, Territorial Governor, had usurped all the federal officers appointed by Congress. The cry of treason had never failed them before, and it bore fruit once again in this instance. It was tearfully alleged by a handful of failed federal appointees and contractors, who had made the trip back to Washington to air their complaints, that the Mormons were oppressing and pillaging every “Gentile” in the Territory. And thus, as it had transpired in Nauvoo, where the frantic anti-Mormonists sent their earnest Governor Ford up and down, back and forth around the region with his State Militia, on repeated wild-goose chases, urgently trying to rescue his constituents from phantom Mormon outrages, the newly elected US president, James Buchanan, eagerly assembled a large military force, dubbed it the “Utah Expedition,” and sent it on its way to install a Christian governor into Utah Territory, and put down this pretended Mormon unrest and rebellion.
But this was all according to plan, a plan outlined clearly in writing by Buchanan and agents of his ruling Democrat Party:
The author of the letter which is reproduced herein, Robert Tyler, was a son of John Tyler, tenth president of the United States. The Tyler family’s American roots stretched back to the mid-seventeenth century when its first representatives settled in Virginia. …His career was dominated by the law and his political interests:
…Phila: April 27, 1857
My dear sir:
The public mind is becoming greatly excited on the subject of Mormonism. The Popular Idea is rapidly maturing that Mormonism (already felt slightly in our large Northern cities) should be put down and utterly extirpated.
I believe that we can supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade. Certainly it is a subject which concerns all the Religious Bodies & reaches every man’s fireside with a peculiar interest. Should you, with your accustomed grip, seize this question with a strong fearless & resolute hand, the Country I am sure will rally to you with an earnest enthusiasm & the pipings of Abolitionism will hardly be heard amidst the thunders of the storm we shall raise. Were I President I would put down & cast out this hideous imposture, equally at War with Conscience, Reason & Philosophy, at all hazards. I would take the ground that the case was anomalous & altogether exceptional–without the limits of ordinary Constitutional treatment–& that the principles of the Democratic Party in regard to Territories consequently had no application. The eyes & hearts of the Nation may be made to find so much interest in Utah as to forget Kansas. [Last emphasis mine.]
…
His Excly ever you friend
James Buchanan Ro: Tylerhttp://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
Once again, Christian America boldly spelled out its intention to usurp the Constitution and all the obviously protected rights of the Mormon people. And more to the point, where American Christians were gravely divided on the issue of slavery, these Democrat Party schemers proposed to brazenly make war upon the Latter-day Saints, not because of any threat or specific offense, but simply to unite Christian America in rejoicing over the destruction of Mormonism, and by this means, secure the religious crossover vote for their political party.
In this however, they only echoed the strategy of the Republicans Party’s first appearance in a national election. The Republican platform featured as its chief planks the “eradication of the twin relics of barbarism: slavery and polygamy.”
President Buchanan naturally, never bothered to investigate or confirm any of the allegations brought to him by the likes of Justice WW Drummond. These allegations included petty complaints like this one, posted in the New York Times April 14, 1857, page 2; paragraph 8:
“I charge the Mormons, and Gov. Young in particular, with imprisoning five or six young men from Missouri and Iowa, who are now in the Penitentiary of Utah, without those men having violated any criminal law in America; but they were Anti-Mormons, poor, uneducated young men, on their way for California….”
http://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
Even in his own words it seems hardly worth an invasion, but Drummond bundled his lame litany of personal bitches into a pattern of infamy.
More often than not the complaints of federal judges and law enforcement officers in early Utah Territory came down to not being able to command and manipulate juries and grand juries to convict Mormon desperadoes like Brigham Young, who they had already decreed guilty before leaving Washington, based upon their mighty federal insistence alone. That’s the way federal judges and law enforcement officers worked throughout the American frontier. They were demigods. Federal appointments were usually political rewards, from which the appointee often expected to set up business and political connections through which to graft, bribe, and extort themselves into a sizeable retirement purse. Mormon jurists however, considered the evidence given, and then voted their own minds regardless of federal instructions. Mormon court, civil and political officers did not play the graft game and there were so few “Gentiles” in the system, that though they 
seemed eager to get a piece of the action, there was just too little influence to peddle and too few Gentile collaborators willing to pay for it.
Unremarkable in every other way, WW Drummond was a Christian “reformer” of some stature, and he very dramatically made his “escape” back to Washington to resign his post. He instantly had Washington’s enthusiastic ear. Washington embraced his rant. It was just what the administration and most of Congress needed to move against Brigham Young. With the additional gripes of a few failed civil contractors thrown in for appearances, WW Drummond’s charges would seem completely credible to the American masses. After all, federal officers don’t lie. (And they actually believed that back then…)
The truth however, is that the history of anti-Mormonism is replete with examples of conspiring Saint-bashers inventing frightening but utterly false tales to elicit public outrage whenever they needed to justify their violence. In some cases they even elaborately faked outrages upon themselves in order to have something suitably horrible to blame upon their uncooperatively peaceful Mormon neighbors. As noted by Governor Thomas Ford in his A Brief history of Illinois:
“In the fall of 1845, the anti-Mormons of Lima and Green Plains, held a meeting to devise means for the expulsion of the Mormons from their neighborhood …. The meeting was held, the house was fired at [by their own people], but so as to hurt no one; and the anti-Mormons suddenly breaking up their meeting, rode all over the country spreading the dire alarm, that the Mormons had commenced the work of massacre and death…. On the eleventh of the month twenty-nine houses were burned [by the anti-Mormons.]”
[Laura A. Cruse, American Republicanism as Shown through Mormon-Federal Conflict, 1846-1890, PhD, Northeast Missouri State University, 1994, page 11, note 9, citing B.H. Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965): 346-7)]
http://fairmormon.org/Criticism_of_Mormonism/Anti-Mormon/History_and_origin_of_the_term
We don’t have to guess the purposes of the Utah Expedition. We have the smoking gun on James Buchanan. We have his version of the “Mob Manifesto” and it follows the same Christian pattern used by the “Regulator” committees in Missouri and Illinois. There was no Mormon rebellion.
Buchanan had promised to destroy the LDS church all through his campaign. One of his closest advisors and Democrat Party-wonk, Robert Tyler, clearly plotted with him to use the military conquest of Mormonism as a wag-the-dog diversion from the burning issue of slavery, and thereby gain both the Southern slaveholder’s vote and the overall religious swing vote on top of it. By this strategy they hoped to insure his re-election and maintain Democrat control of Congress. They include in their scheme, in writing, an open admission that they would have to suspend the Constitution in Utah Territory to do so.
The Utah Expedition was nothing more than religiously driven, politically sanctioned, naked aggression against the Mormon church. So of course, not only did James Buchanan take WW Drummond’s ravings at face value, but he also made no effort at all to inform Brigham Young of these charges, solicit a rebuttal, or seek further explanation from Young or anyone else. He made no indication of his intentions at all to anyone in the Territory of Utah. He had already long decided to kill Mormonism. He was only waiting for a pretense.
Buchanan’s expedition formed itself in the enemy 
hinterlands of former anti-Mormon War regions of the Midwest. As it grew, the Utah Expedition shed all pretense of “investigation,” and soon billed itself openly as an army of extermination and revenge. It took very little time for Brigham Young to hear about these developments through unofficial channels. Buchanan’s total lack of communication notwithstanding, it is then alleged by Christian apologists that Brigham Young responded to the news of his termination and a new governor’s appointment by issuing a “declaration of war,” against the United States:
CITIZENS OF UTAH:
We are invaded by hostile forces, who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction.
For the last twenty-five years we have trusted officials of the government, from Constables and Justices to Judges, Governors and Presidents, only to be scorned, held in derision, insulted and betrayed. Our houses have been plundered and then burned; our fields laid waste, our principal men butchered while under the pledged faith of the Government for their safety, and our families driven from their homes to find that shelter in the barren wilderness, and that protection among hostile savages, which were denied them in the boasted abodes of Christianity and civilization.
The constitution of our common country guarantees unto us all that we do now or ever claimed.
If the constitutional rights, which pertain unto us as American citizens, were extended to Utah, according to the spirit and meaning thereof, and fairly and impartially administered, it is all that we could ask.
Our opponents have availed themselves of prejudices existing against us, because of our religious faith, to send out a formidable host to accomplish our destruction. We have had no privilege, no
opportunity of defending ourselves from the false, foul and unjust aspersions against us before the Nation. The Government has not condescended to cause an investigating committee or other person to be sent to inquire into and ascertain the truth, as is customary in such cases. We know those aspersions to be false, but that avails us nothing. We are condemned unheard, and forced to an issue with an armed mercenary mob, which has been sent against us at the instigation of anonymous letter writers, ashamed to father the base, slanderous falsehoods which they have given to the public; of corrupt officials who have brought false accusations against us, to screen themselves in their own infamy; and of hireling priests and howling editors, who prostitute the truth for filthy lucre’s sake.
The issue which has been thus forced upon us compels us to resort to the great first law of self preservation, and stand in our own defense, a right guaranteed unto us by the genius of the institutions of our country, and upon which the Government is based.
Our duty to our families requires us not to tamely submit to be driven and slain without an attempt to preserve ourselves. Our duty to our country, our holy religion, our God, to freedom and liberty, requires that we should not quietly stand still and see those fetters forging around, which are calculated to enslave and bring us into subjection to an unlawful military despotism, such as can only emanate (in a country of constitutional law) from usurpation, tyranny and oppression.
Therefore, I, Brigham Young, Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory of Utah, in the name of the people or the United States in the Territory of Utah,
First – Forbid all armed forces of every description from coming into this Territory, under any pretense whatever.
Second – That all the forces in said Territory hold themselves in readiness to march at a moment’s notice, to repel any and all such invasion
Third – Martial law is hereby declared to exist in this Territory, from and after the publication of this Proclamation; and no person shall be allowed to pass or repass, into or through, or from this Territory without a permit from the proper officer.
Given under my hand and seal at Great Salt Like City, Territory of Utah, this fifteenth day of September, A.D. eighteen hundred and fifty seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America, the eighty -second.
(Signed) BRIGHAM YOUNG
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/martiallaw.html
In the words of Malcolm X: A man has a right to survive through whatever means necessary. Malcolm said that with an assault rifle in his hands and he’s a “Freedom Fighter.” No so, Brigham Young. Mormonism is still too small a minority for that I suppose.
Buchanan’s so-called Mormon “rebellion,” was just another Christian exercise in the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you declare Mormonism in rebellion. Then you send an army of extermination against them. Then, oddly enough, you find that they rebel from this procedure.
Far from a declaration of war on the United States of America, Brigham Young’s reply to the Utah Expedition only proves once-again that Mormons look upon the Constitution as a Divinely inspired document that guarantees religious and civil liberty to all races, creeds and colors. And yet, the Holy Conspiracy still claims that shortly after publishing this graciously composed, Constitutionally sound, and entirely reasonable statement of territorial defensive policy, Brigham Young decided he’d just pick up the nonexistent telephone, call a few bishops down the three-hundred miles sou
th to Mountain Meadows, and see if his sparse collection of emaciated Mormon lackeys had a spare minute to butcher a randomly selected wagon train full of harmless Christian pilgrims–if any could be found coincidentally camped in the vicinity at that particular moment.
Apparently James Buchanan thought he would just march a large body of artillery and troops out and storm the Salt Lake Valley. I guess he thought it would be that easy. All the way out, this obvious assault force telegraphed its mission at every opportunity to boast of Mormon annihilation. Yet, from the whole of the United States government, there wasn’t any communication of any sort, transmitted in any fashion to the Governor of Utah Territory, explaining the Utah Expedition. All Brigham Young knew, was that it was cursing him and his people all the way from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Bridger, it was armed to the teeth, rolled with heavy artillery, and was swearing the death and destruction of the Mormons. From Brigham Young’s perspective, that pretty much spelled it all out in big block letters.
Brigham Young didn’t need a memo from Washington to explain the Utah Expedition. The Utah Expedition was the memo from Washington. There was very little to misinterpret in that message. The destruction of Mormonism was after all, the key plank in the platform upon which James Buchanan had gotten himself elected.
Brigham Young quickly learned another unsettling bit of information as well: The new governor being inflicted upon them was a man named Alfred Cumming, the same name as one of the most prominent Jackson County Missouri mobocrats. It was also heard that this new governor was from Missouri. Though it turned out that Governor Cumming was a rather nice Christian gentleman from Georgia, and not the Missouri mobber at all, while awaiting the US invasion of Utah, a Mormon campfire song erroneously evolved:
Old Sam has sent I understand
Doo Dah. Doo Dah.
A Missouri ass to rule our land,
Doo Dah, Doo Dah Day…
–Roberts Comprehensive History of the Church Volume 4, pg 396
In the same year of 1857, as the US Army was loading up guns, bombs, and filling out its troops in Kansas, there was also a wagon train making its way past them and on into Mormon country. This was known as the Fancher Party, named for the main family of 
Christian pilgrims it was transporting to California. They passed through Salt Lake City short on supplies, and very quickly became pissed off that the local Mormons weren’t inclined to sell them the provisions they’d been counting on.
The Fanchers are often billed by their admiring, evangelical, anti-Mormon legacy as wealthy farmers. They are lovingly described by their proponents as simple, God-fearing family-types. And so they were—by East Tennessee Regulator-culture standards that is. Even the most “civilized” of them were seasoned pioneers, frontiersmen, and hard-as-nails rugged. The Fancher Party was made up of simple farmers in the same way Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were simple farmers. It was the Fanchers and their kin who fought the battle of the Alamo.
Their trail partners on the other hand, were essentially a border-gang from Missouri who called themselves the “Wildcats.” These were not fun nick-names that some New-Gentrified, farmer-rednecks gave themselves to make their card-club sound daring while they relaxed over a mint-julep and played gin rummy after working their enslaved negroes in the fields all day. These weren’t whimsical Christian plowboys who entertained themselves in the off-season by putting buggies on barn roofs or pranking the Amish by painting their buckboards in bright colors. The Wildcats didn’t just go about the countryside scribbling mean, anti-Abolitionist epithets on outhouse walls. This was a 
self-described, hard-core, seasoned, Missouri band of Regulators, a violent, murdering, brutalizing vigilante squad, well versed in torture, torment, death and destruction. While the Wildcats were heading to California for gold, gambling, whores and fortune, their Missouri brothers were staying behind giving us “Bleeding Kansas,” the brutish, pro-slavery border war that actually delayed the departure of the Utah Expedition just long enough to allow Mormonism to prepare a very successful defense.
Even so-called “neutral” historians have always wondered why these “simple Christian farmers” would fall into the company of cutthroats and ruffians. Honestly, only the latter-day anthropological simpleton could have a problem reconciling this nonexistent conflict of identities. Still, this is a puzzle many historians on both sides have continuously used to prove either this or that point: that the two were entirely separate, disinterested parties only very briefly together out of necessity and security, or that the Fanchers and Bakers and other “family” elements of the train were just as profane and rowdy as the Missourians. Neither is true.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-bleedingkansas3.html
For most purposes, the Fanchers, Bakers, a few other amalgamated families and friends, were indeed a cut well above the Missouri “pukes.” (A regional nick-name at the time.) What seems astoundingly ignorant to me however, as a hack-writer and amateur historian of highly dubious qualifications, is that nobody has ever noticed that these ostensibly disparate groups of people are to the contrary, ethnic brethren. They’re all Scots-Irish, East Tennessee, Protestant, Fundamentalist kinfolk, from the same genetic, religious, ideological and cultural seed. While the Fanchers may have fled the Tennessee hills to find more productive land, a few more manners and a little more prosperity in Arkansas, it has always been the landed-Gentry, the Church-going Fancher types, who have enabled, directed, and validated the violence of the hillbilly Regulator-types. Coarse social elements like the 
Missouri Wildcats have always been groomed and exploited by Christianity’s more refined citizens, to “regulate” their society according to their common desires and prejudices whenever violence is wanted and the hands of the “civil” must not be stained with the blood of infidels. The Wildcats were idiot cousins to the Fanchers perhaps, but cousins just the same—cousins of a common ethnic and religious experience.
And keep in mind also, that as the “good Christian” Fanchers were heading for California, their “good Christian” contemporaries, Abolitionist settlers under John Brown, were in turn, personally hacking up the Fancher’s pro-slave Tennessee brothers in Kansas, and then dressing up in their best Sunday suits for respectable photographs, and sharing the Communion of the Saints like innocent angels. Violence was just a thing “good Christians” did back in the day. Just a thing they still do.
http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/exhibits/john_brown/page2.html
As they made their way through Salt Lake City, down the Wasatch Front and through the lower, distant Mormon settlements, the Fanchers became increasingly more disgruntled at not getting all the supplies they wanted, and paying high prices for anything they did manage to buy off the Mormons. The Bakers, the Fanchers, Wildcats, or whoever–began to shoot their mouths off about the huge army that was boasted to be right on their heels, an army that would soon put the Mormons in their place. It was then that Utah’s Mormon survivors of previous Christian military actions begin to think they recognized some of the mouthy Wildcats as having been part of the mobs and rogue militias who had burned and slaughtered them out of Missouri and Illinois.
In the fall of 1857, after several years of drought and bad crops, Mormons in Utah did not want to sell their scarce provisions to anyone, much less the same smart-mouthed, murdering Missouri bastards who’d driven them into that wilderness. Now, you can say the Fanchers themselves were from Arkansas all you want, but they were the same Appalachian, East Tennessee, Andy Jackson rednecks Mormons knew all too well from previous persecutions. There were 70 men and boys in their company who were imposing riflemen. They were healthy, and strongly built from years of heavy frontier farm work. The Fancher Party had additional older girls and women who could shoot plenty good too. They had at least 11 hard-core “Regulators,” as ruthless and competent a band off semi-professional killers as the American frontier had ever seen. They outgunned and outnumbered every single one of the settlements they passed through in the lowest, hottest, deadest stretches of the Mormon sphere of influence.
With a Born-Again army of invasion on its way, and all communication lines cut by the federal government, the Mormons of southern Utah were in a very conservative frame of mind. Mormonism was hunkering down for an extended fight and expected to be soon cutoff from all supply lines. To them, the Fancher Party did not look like a Sunday School class fellowshipping its way to California. They looked like trouble.
There are of course, pro-Fancher, “sainted hillbilly” versions of this wagon train, where there never were any 
“Wildcats” and the Fanchers are portrayed as a small, unarmed, helplessly naïve Bible-study group. But the fact remains that the very territories they were emigrating from were full of mixed, migrating groups of Ruffian and “good Christian settler” components, and they were indeed shooting the hell out of “Redskins,” Abolitionists and Freestate competitors all over Kansas, Missouri, and “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. They were all Appalachian spin-offs, trying to get their share of the open land and goodies for the cause of slavery and King Cotton. They were a tough crowd. Not only did this ethnic, religious, political, combination of “Fanchers” and “Wildcats” win Texas for slavery, but only a few years later this same lot would beat the mighty Union to a near-defeat in one of the bloodiest Civil Wars in history, with nothing but a few rifles, their fighting skill and sheer bravery.
Utah territorial records clearly expose the myth of the Fancher Party’s oft-touted Christian purity. They are plainly recorded moving through the Salt Lake and Utah Valleys clearly united with the Duke Party. The Dukes were unequivocally boasted to be from Missouri. The Dukes bragged of some 11 self-identified members of a volunteer militia called the “Wildcats.” The “Wildcats” were in fact “regulators” or vigilante mobs that enforced Darwinian-Democracy’s Christian “cultural” mandates through extra-legal violence and murder in period vernacular. If not the mob that killed Joseph Smith, they were of the same type and pedigree. Whether or not they had any direct action against the Missouri or Nauvoo Saints is uncertain. That they inherently hated the Latter-day Saints is not debatable.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-bleedingkansas3.html
The Duke and Fancher parties were repeatedly recorded travelling and negotiating for supplies and camp space together as a combined train. It is often claimed by pro-Fancher “historians” that the Wildcats actually left the slower moving Baker-Fancher train shortly after Salt Lake City. In this scenario, it is therefore contended that the Fanchers and other emigrant families were utterly innocent of any offense that might have precipitated their demise at Mountain Meadows. But then again, the irony of these sorts of pioneering wagon train disasters, is that the hellfire of Native and local vengeance usually falls upon the train immediately following the arse-holes who initiate all the trouble.
Neither the Mormons nor the Indians responsible for their destruction would have had any clear way to distinguish their ideological or physical separation from the Duke Party Wildcats. Frankly, to the Mormons, they were all hillbilly rednecks. They all spoke with the same East Tennessee twang. They all prayed to the same vengeful, anti-Mormon God, and cursed heathen Indians and the Latter-day Saints as their common enemies. To the Indians, they were all “shwop.” Indeed, the local Indians only had two names for white men: shwop, and Mormon. Mormons were their friends. Shwop were their enemies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hysteria_preceding_the_Mountain_Meadows_massacre
While the Fundamentalist legacy of the Fancher Party may be convinced they see the whole matter of Mountain Meadows with crystal clarity, in all honesty, the only thing clearly evident in the surviving jumble of half-facts, bigoted personal opinion, and bold speculation, is that there was a massive culture clash that ensued when the Fancher train passed through southern Utah. This time however, it wasn’t the hillbilly rednecks who had the entire region’s social and governmental establishments bent decidedly in their favor. This time, things did not go their way. This time they could not just beat up, shoot up, or string up the offending Mormons and take what they wanted away from them like they had done for two generations in Missouri and Illinois, or like they were doing in Kansas to the Abolitionists and Freestaters.
Occam’s razor, the once-popular burden-of-proof test states: “Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.” Rather than attempt to empirically validate that theory, I’ll just say that for my money, I think what happened to the Fancher Party at Mountain Meadows in the Fall of 1857, was that this particular wagon load of hillbillies crapped on exactly the wrong group of Mormons at just the wrong time, in absolutely the wrong place.
This narrative is a good summary of the main players and events connected with the Mountain Meadows Massacre:
In August of 1857 a wagon train of immigrants from Arkansas and Missouri known as the Fancher Party began to take the trail through Utah on their way to California. Due to the war preparations in the Utah territory they were unable to purchase many of the provisions they needed and had planned to buy in Salt Lake City. Out of frustration, this train began to lash out at the Saints threatening to take news of the insurrection to California and bring back troops. Additionally, some of the immigrants began to boast that they had participated in the Missouri persecutions (including Haun’s Mill) and some sources indicate that one immigrant claimed to be carrying the gun that killed Joseph Smith.[xvi] As the train moved through Salt Lake City and on to the southern settlements, some immigrants began to steal provisions that they were unable to buy out of sheer desperation. The Fancher party’s frustration combined with the anger, paranoia and thirst for vengeance by the southern Saints created an environment ripe for violence. In speaking of the actions of some of the southern Saints when they became aware of the Fancher party, its claims and activities; Juanita Brooks explains:
Immediately following the regular church service, a special meeting was called of the Stake High Council. Isaac C. Haight, as the highest in religious authority [stake president] and the one in command of the military organization in the town, was in charge of this indignation meeting. The local officers wanted the help of the militia to enforce the law, and various members expressed themselves freely as to what should be done with regard to the emigrant company. Some felt that the travelers should not be allowed to get away with such defiance.
A resolution was presented and passed to the effect that we will deal with this situation now, so that our hands will be free to meet the army when it comes. After it was passed, Laban Morrill and others began to ask questions. What, specifically, did the brethren mean by dealing with the situation now? Arrest and punish the offenders? Some felt that this would do no good; it would only mean men to guard them and food to feed them, and no one any better off.
So, it was suggested that they be done away with. Ever since the days of Missouri and Nauvoo, ever since the martyrdom of their prophet, the Saints had been taught that they should never cease to importune the Lord to avenge the blood of the prophets. Now, here were the men who had boasted openly and defiantly that they had helped to kill Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. One had displayed the pistol which fired the fatal shot. All had laughed to scorn the attempts of the local officers to arrest them. [Because the Fancher train outgunned and outnumbered the whole region.] Should they forget the oaths of vengeance which they had taken and sit back weakly while such as these taunted them? (emphasis added)[xvii]
Entire books have been written in an attempt to explain the events of September 11, 1857.[xviii] For sake of brevity, I will offer only the essential details. A group of Indians[xix] and zealous Mormons led by Isaac Haight and John D. Lee (both leaders of the Church in southern Utah) attacked the Fancher party at Mountain Meadows on or about September 7th. [Actually, Lee was not a bishop as popularly assumed, he was an elder, led a tiny branch in a very small settlement, and was a liaison to the Native Americans as an agricultural advisor.] Apparently, the Fancher party was better-armed than had been expected and withstood the initial assault. The fighting went on for several days but on September 11, a group of Mormon men approached the
party under the pretense of peace offering to escort the group safely to the next settlement on the condition that the immigrants disarm and walk away protected by the company of Mormons. The Fancher party agreed to the request and was marched about one-half mile from their wagons when a signal was given by Mormon leaders and all members of the immigrant party, with the exception of those children who were not yet old enough to speak, were summarily shot and killed.
Just for the record, the bold emphasis above is mine. I wanted to clearly note that the text actually deals with the Brethren urging the Saints to pray to the Lord to do all the avenging. The actual Mormon canon on the subject of raining death upon your fellow man is:
18 And now, behold, I speak unto the church. Thou shalt not akill; and he that bkills shall cnot have forgiveness in this world, nor in the world to come.
79 And it shall come to pass, that if any persons among you shallakill they shall be delivered up and dealt with according to the laws of the land; for remember that he hath no forgiveness; and it shall be proved according to the laws of the land.
–D&C Section 42, 9 February 1831
According to most accounts, the Fancher Train also seems to have pissed off just the wrong group of Indians,
at just the wrong time, at just the wrong place. We can argue ignorantly and inconclusively forever, who provoked or nudged the Indians into open attack, the Fancher crew themselves or diabolical Mormon instigators. Again, my money’s on the simple explanation: the Fanchers pissed off both the Indians and the Mormons. The Indians wanted to go to war, the Mormons said, go ahead, knock yourselves out–we don’t like them anyway and we have bigger fish to fry. When the Fanchers proved tougher than expected, the Indians joyfully invited the local Mormons to help them actively and personally in the war party.
http://historyofmormonism.com/mormon-history/utah_war_period/
http://mountainmeadowsmassacre.com/
http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/meadows2.htm
Assuming all of this, we’re still short of any half-intelligent motivation for the particularly cold-blooded strategy executed so efficiently by the Mormons to conclude the hostilities at Mountain Meadows. It can be deduced that the Mormons sought to overcome the superior position and fighting instincts of the wild and wooly Fancher gang, who had by then thoroughly dug in, out-smarted and outshot the Indians. But the most logical explanation for the Mormon decision to go beyond simple defeat to total extermination however, seems to be that there was a daring nighttime escape by two brave souls of the Fancher Party during the initial Indian-only part of the siege on Wednesday, 10 September. These escapees encountered three unidentified white men near the Mormon settlement of Pinto, who they approached for assistance. Instead of finding help, they were shot at, and one of the Fancher crew was killed on the spot. The second fled, slipped back, re-entered the Fancher stronghold, and eventually perished with the rest of his companions.
By Thursday, 11 September, a rally call from John Lee had gathered ‘round him as many as fifty or sixty Mormon combatants, most of whom were very young men and older boys. It is often claimed that Lee used the Mormon “militia” against the Fanchers, again anachronistically assuming that the Fanchers were helpless weaklings facing a large Mormon military assault. Quite untrue. Alone, Lee’s meager, unproven force was not sufficient to overcome the Fancher’s entrenched position and experienced riflemen. The Indians, no strangers to warfare, hadn’t been doing so well even with their greater numbers. The night before and again that morning, Lee’s party debated what to do about the situation. While in these deliberations, and while still waiting for direct word from the courier sent to get instructions from Brigham Young, this troubled Mormon war party heard the story of the Pinto shooting.
Now, according to the Mormon attackers–the only surviving witnesses to these events–up until they heard the Pinto news, the affair at Mountain Meadows had been an Indian attack. Lee and crew had been reluctantly entangled in the operation as advisors. It was clear that most of them still had deep reservations about getting directly involved in the whole mess. However, the business of hostile whites shooting at escaping members of the Fancher’s crew, now clearly incriminated the Mormons. That changed the tenor of the Mormon deliberations. At that point, it was thought that allowing any of the Fancher Party to live and retell that story in California would bring federal troops from the south who would fall upon their indefensible southern settlements within a week or two. Also, their Indian brothers were becoming more and more offended at the Mormon reluctance to help the war party out.
The thing you have to understand about the Missouri Wildcats and the Mormon claims that they were conjuring up threats of militant boogey men, is that the Mormons 
knew that the boogey man really did exist. They had seen him often. He really did come and take your supplies by force if he wanted them and leave you unarmed and starving. He did burn you out of your house, and he did rape your women, kill your friends and children, and hack people into bits. More to the point: The boogey man who routinely came upon the Mormons to take their stuff by force, raining leaden hellfire, almost always had an East Tennessee accent, called himself a “simple country farmer,” claimed to be a “God-fearing Christian,” and had friends who formed gangs they titled with heroic names like “Wildcats,” and “Regulators.” The Mormons also knew that when you called for help from state and federal troops, most of the time they showed up with the same hick accents, were members of the same secret vigilance clubs, and rather than rescue you, they helped the boogeyman destroy everyone and everything you ever loved.
Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church V 4, pg 153, 372
http://www.yorgalily.org/~yorgasor/church/ComprehensiveHistoryOfTheChurch/hc4.html
Pro-Fanchers often deny it, but a fair part of this nightmare is firmly rooted in the fact that at least some number in that ill fated company took great pleasure in openly baiting the local Mormons:
…When passing through Provo, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, the emigrants decided to stop and let their animals rest. An area just west of the town had been marked off, by the local settlers, as use for animal feed during the upcoming winter. The emigrants allowed their livestock to wander into this area, and after seeing this the local settlers asked the party to move on to another area a few miles to the west; even offering to help them move.[3] One of the party’s leaders refused saying “This is Uncle Sam’s grass…We are staying right here.”, so the settlers gave them the option of fighting or leaving; the party left.[3] After camping the night, the Baker-Fancher party continued to pass through Utah over the next few weeks, arriving near Cedar City on Thursday, September 3, 1857.[4]
Cedar City was the last major settlement where emigrants could stop to buy grain and supplies b
efore a long stretch of wilderness leading to California.[5] When the Baker-Fancher train arrived there, however, they were turned a cold shoulder once again; important goods were not available in the town store, and the local miller charged an exorbitant price for grinding grain.[5] As tension between the Mormons and the emigrants mounted, a member of the Baker-Fancher train was said to have bragged how he had the very gun that “shot the guts out of Old Joe Smith“.[6] Other members of the party reportedly bragged about taking part in the Haun’s Mill massacre some decades before in Missouri.[5] Others were reported by Mormons to have threatened to join the incoming federal troops, or join troops from California, and march against the Mormons….[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_and_siege_of_the_Mountain_Meadows_massacre
If we are to deny the Mormon claims of these continued provocations, the mystery here, is that the Fancher Party would not have been singled out of a whole season of wagon trains simply because Mormons and Indians just naturally hated good, peaceful Christians. The “Virginal Fancher” apologists can only keep insisting that Brigham Young ordered their execution because he’s evil. They can’t however, come up with a logical reason for ordering this particular action against this particular wagon train at this particular time.
As for the Native Americans, well, Christian America has been billing them as mindless, murdering savages 
from the days of Jamestown onward. The Indian part of the story isn’t hard for Christian America to pass off as commonplace barbarity even if they want to claim the Mormons recruited them to do the dastardly deed. Oddly enough, the Fancher apologists sometimes go so far as to claim fantastically, that there wasn’t a single Indian involved at Mountain Meadows, it was all Mormon, from start to finish, conception to completion.
Apart from the fact that the Fancher apologists so desperately want to portray their Christian martyrs as even saintlier than the Saints, the story of their battle with the Indians and their Mormon accomplices—or vice-versa–is fairly heroic. According to their assassins, they shot like professionals and could have held off the attack for as long as they had ammunition.
The Fancher Party had sunk their wagons up to the axles and chained them in a circle. In this strong defensive posture. The Indians who engaged them initially, made little progress and took high losses. The Mormon conspirators estimated that their combined Indian and Mormon forces would still take weeks to finish them off, and then again, only with high losses. The Fancher Party, whoever they were, whatever else they were, constituted a very serious force to be reckoned with in the deserted wilds of southern 
Utah Territory. If the Fancher Party had decided to come into town and take their provisions from the Mormons by force, they could have done just that.
Was this a likely eventuality? Yes. For all they knew, they were indefinitely stuck with waning provisions, in a desert hellhole, impatiently waiting for word to come back from Salt Lake City, so the local Mormon authorities could decide whether they should let them pass through or not. And if not, then what? But the Fancher faithful are no different than the Mormon apologists in this regard–the Fanchers can’t just be examined as normal human beings, they have to be adored as sainted, Christ-like aberrations you’d never encounter in real life anywhere, much less within a hearty, frontier, rednecked, hillbilly-pioneering tradition.
The Fanchers probably had no great fear of the pitiful Yankee Mormon locals. They knew from long reputation that Latter-day Saints never went to fighting unless it was the absolute last resort. And then only after weeks of leadership meetings followed by public assemblies, a lot of voting, speeches, counseling, and handwringing. The Missouri asses the Fanchers joined up with certainly would never have worried about being discrete in their utterations. The Missouri mob-militias hadn’t been afraid to take on the well-armed Mormon “Danites” who banded against them at Gallatin and Far West. They showed no fear of the huge, well-outfitted Nauvoo Legion, or the Illinois State Militia Regulars who defended the Mormons at the fall of Nauvoo. They had a long history of undertaking open warfare against the Saints with childish glee, as if the bigger the battle, the better the sport.
It appears indeed, that the Wildcat faction of the Fancher Party actually kept increasing its provocative rhetoric as their train grew more and more distant from the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City. While the Wildcats were amplifying and perfecting their taunts, it was also becoming widely known that the Fanchers were from Arkansas and the local Saints had recently learned that their beloved Mormon apostle and charismatic missionary, Parley P Pratt, had been stabbed to death back there in the Fancher’s home state by a jealous “good Christian” husband who said he was afraid Pratt was trying to convert his wife so he could help her run off to Utah with his kids. And then the southern Utah Saints learned Brigham Young had declared martial law, just about the time the Wildcats were bragging about shooting Joe Smith’s guts out.
Even “neutral” historians today still leave you with the impression that the Fanchers were a tiny handful of starving Christian pilgrims, humbled by the surrounding Mormon military might. That’s not however, what our infamously anti-Mormon Judge John Cradlebaugh argued in his report to president Buchanan:
…I have lately visited the southern settlement of this Territory, particularly the place where 119 emigrants were massacred, at the Mountain Meadows on the 10th of September, 1857. Eighty or more white men were engaged in that affair. Warrants are now in the hands of the Marshal for forty of them. The entire population within 150 miles of the Meadows does not exceed 1,100 — with not more than 200 of an adult male population.
Cradlebaugh’s estimate is actually an argument for giving him a federal marshal and a few troops and he could easily thrash the hell out of his whole southern district until he got to the bottom of it all. This also concurs with John Lee’s claim that all he could muster was his handful of local church leaders and some fifty or sixty older boys to make up his allegedly fierce “militia.”
Mountain Meadows is not Nauvoo, it isn’t even anywhere near Salt Lake City. St. George and Cedar City, the two largest settlements closest to Mountain Meadows, were rough villages at the time. (Some say still are…) The Fanchers were already nearly ready to fight in Provo, and the handful of old farts and youngsters that John D Lee barely managed to scrape together some 250 miles south of there in the desert, was not the Nauvoo Legion. It was the Fancher Party that represented a concentration of frontier hardiness and aggression as it passed through southern Utah, not the local Mormons. The Fancher Party, with or without any Missouri Wildcats, could have easily taken any Mormon town in 
southern Utah at the time without breaking a sweat. Any two or three of them.
Today, you have all the leisure and resources to casually research this little group of emigrants from “Arkansas.” John D Lee and Isaac Haight had neither, squatting around a council fire, with an army of extermination on the way and a bunch of Indians nagging at them in the wilds of southern Utah. Perception is reality. The last experience these isolated and utterly exposed Mormons had with the likes of the Fanchers and probably the Wildcats themselves, in Missouri and Illinois, was twice-attempted genocide. In Missouri, it remained legal by standing executive order to shoot Mormons on sight until 1976.
http://bransonmissouri.missourinetizen.com/2008/09/mormon-massacre-and-apology.html
To the Mormons on the lowest fringe of Utah Territory in 1857, living under threat of federal invasion and extermination in the undefendable southern extreme of the Mormon dominion, the Fancher Party was perceived to be the boogeyman. A large, belligerent, smart-assed, well-armed boogeyman.
On 11 September, 1857, on the Mountain Meadows of southern Utah, a small group of panicked, pissed-off and disoriented local Mormons killed the boogeyman. That’s what Mountain Meadows is all about.
Why is this so hard to believe?
Mormon Wars Part 3: Hillbilly Rednecks
In every case of bona-fide Mormon “outrage” against Christian antagonists, the actual record proves that the Mormons were the original injured parties, that they were only guilty of re-action, and in every case, this reaction became necessary only because civil protection had been denied them and they were left to fend for themselves. So they fended. Sometimes not so skillfully, sometimes not so fairly. Often not so calmly.
Sometimes not very rationally.
Still, even “neutral” historians constantly feel obligated to point out that many of these Mormon reactions to Christianity’s non-stop persecution were over-reactions, and sometimes this led to collateral damage against innocent parties. No dispute there. Valid criticism. From the perspective of a minority community being systematically tormented, and when viewed within the context of a continual struggle against an openly hostile surrounding culture possessing superior numbers and openly avowing the death and destruction of Mormonism and all its adherents, men, women, and children, it must be conceded that it would be easy for the Mormon community to “over”-react to threats, real, and imagined. For instance:
Bill for Removing of the Press of the “Nauvoo Expositor.”
Resolved by the city council of the city of Nauvoo, that the printing office from whence issues the Nauvoo Expositor is a public nuisance; and also of said Nauvoo Expositors which may be or exist in said establishment; and the mayor is instructed to cause said establishment and papers to be removed without delay, in such manner as he shall direct.
Passed June 10th, 1844. Geo. W. Harris, President pro tem.
W. Richards, Recorder.
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 284
Why did Mayor Smith and his city council think the Nauvoo Expositor a public nuisance? Apart from the lame serial dramas, the bad poetry features, and poor writing in general, is had been established right under the nose of Joseph Smith by several apostate Mormons who’d been excommunicated for wanting to set up their own franchise on multiple wives–only they didn’t want to actually marry any of them, and though they were claiming they had it, they certainly didn’t think they needed Smith’s approval. It was the Nauvoo Expositor’s only mission to harangue Joseph Smith particularly over the plural marriage issue, call him names, make charges of villainy and pretend he was behind the sex orgies and covert assassination squads its founders had been excommunicated for attempting to set up in the Mormon community under his name. Any other content in the rag was an exercise in vanity on the part of the contributors, and scarcely journalism anyway. And yes, they were “exposing” some sensitive doctrines about plural marriage Smith didn’t want publicly explored yet, and certainly not by a group he’d tried to rid himself of, and who now were deliberately attempting to twist a touchy doctrinal revelation before the public via the most unflattering and distorted characterizations of plural marriage a group of whore mongers, abortionists, lechers, and thugs could contrive. That sort of thing emanating from the capital of Mormonism could get a lot of Mormons killed.
O
r at least, that was obviously the essential opinion of the Nauvoo City Council.
The press was destroyed and the type was melted in a bonfire in the street. Was that an over-reaction? Perhaps. But not considering that anti-Mormon presses all around them were bringing death and persecution already, and one more from the heart of Mormonism would only add credibility to the already dangerous hyperbole being used against the church.
Was the Nauvoo Expositor’s destruction legal? As a zoning matter, yes, marginally. Was the "public nuisance" legal ploy used Constitutional? If proposed as a zoning issue, perhaps yes, in the same way you might ban whorehouses or sex shops or gun and whiskey stores near school playgrounds and so forth–in which case the Expositor’s company would simply be free to set up shop outside city limits. But, as Joseph Smith replied to this line of inquiry:
…In relation to the press, you say that you differ from me in opinion. Be it so; the thing, after all, is only a legal difficulty, and the courts, I should judge, are competent to decide on that matter. If our act was illegal, we are willing to meet it…
–Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 437
http://www.archive.org/stream/risefallofnauvoo00byu2robe#page/n3/mode/2up
The old Christian settlers and their apostate-Mormon enablers replied to this reasoned appeal to the law by shooting Joseph Smith all to hell before he could get into a courtroom. Joseph Smith had a habit of winning these sorts of legal challenges, from New York to Illinois, year after year, case after case. It was easier to just kill him than risk another loss. I’m not guessing. This is what was openly boasted by the mob before they murdered him. Then they raided, beat, pillaged, burned, tortured, shot, stabbed, and cannonaded their way through the rest of the local Mormon population, systematically, until they had all been killed or driven into the western wilderness.
So, you tell me. Who really over-reacted?
The question is, why were Mormons hated and persecuted? Was it really brought upon themselves via their overtly evil practices? Did their peaceful, God-loving neighbors spontaneously rebel against their tyranny in an attempt to liberate themselves from despotic Mormon oppression? Christian apologists will keep trying to sell you on that concept. But that’s not what history shows. History reveals a preponderance of evidence suggesting that Mormons are a very accommodating and industrious people. History however, also shows that if you heap enough crap on a Mormon he’ll eventually get fed up and kick your ass. And then he’ll want to keep kicking your ass until you aren’t a problem for him any more. All that proves is, Mormons are human beings.
The question again is, why did Mormonism’s frontier neighbors want to heap a load of poo on them in the first place, and just who was doing it?
Two simple answers: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christians were persecuting the early Mormons, and they were doing it for two reasons—religion and politics. In the mind of the WASP, or really most any other period Christian however, that’s only one reason. Christians have always believed that religion and politics are inseparable, and that the arm of civil law must necessarily be expressly Christian to protect and enforce their Christian faith. In more liberal, even “mainstream” Christian sects today, this notion has been all but abandoned in favor of an almost equally self-hating and suicidal sense of “political correctness” that puts dog-worshippers, Satanists, Islamo-Jihadists, or GLBT neo-Pagan druidic sodomites on the same moral level as any of the Christian sects—with the exception of course of Mormonism. In that case, Liberal and Moderate Christians still choose to hate Mormons because they dare maintain that donkey-lovers and sexually altered sodomites don’t deserve the same rights to adoption and marriage as good Christian men and women do, and hold other “intolerant” social views about “negroes,” or so they believe. But even today the bulk of the Religious Right mentally screen and edit the inspired words of the Founding Fathers, and deduce that the Constitutional authors had always intended to form a nation built upon a document designed to protect American Christians from the polluting ideas and practices of the infidel. If you want to make some equivalent charge against the Mormons, if you want to claim that Mormonism is all about forcing an exclusive LDS theocracy upon the United States and the world in general, you’re fighting a litany of canonized LDS expressions of loyalty to the US Constitution and its principles. A simple Google of Mormon patriotism will instantly produce volumes of open, pluralistic professions of respect for Jeffersonian religious liberty from Mormon leadership, spanning over two centuries of their church.
As I have said to you before, so I say again, the Constitution of the United States is a great and treasured part of my religion, and the revelations of the Lord and the words of our inspired leaders compel it to be so. The overturning, or the material changing, or the distortion of any fundamental principle of our constitutional government would thus do violence to my religion.
God grant that this people shall never give the lie to Brother Brigham, and that ever and always "the Elders of Israel will protect and sustain civil and religious liberty and every constitutional right bequeathed to us by our fathers."
–J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Stand Fast by Our Constitution, pp. 8-9
I have ranted frequently about the “Secret Constitution” of the old Christian settlers in the Mormon persecutions and expulsions from various counties in Missouri–including expulsion from one established specifically for Mormons by the state legislature, Caldwell. A “Mob Manifesto,” and an Extermination order from Missouri’s governor are hard to defend even today, even by the most apologetic Christian apologists. (They give it a good try anyway.) But it is seldom mentioned by Mormon or anti-Mormonist alike, that a similar, highly organized, Christian, Darwinian democracy-styled resolution was drafted by some nine counties around Nauvoo. These Christian patriots in southern Illinois, in the name of American liberty, drafted a compact, like their brethren had across the river in Missouri, issuing a demand for total Mormon expulsion from the state, under a bit more carefully worded threat of extermination, but a threat nonetheless. Christian mobbers had by then of course, learned to be a little craftier at the tactics and language they used, to give their “spontaneous” mob violence and predatory, pack-mentality the sweet smell of law and order. In the Illinois version of deputizing the anti-Mormon mob, the first step was to repeal the Nauvoo City charter, which they pulled off in 1845, less than a year after murdering Joseph Smith. This removed from the Mormon community any legal standing to act in their own defense. As unincorporated land, Nauvoo and environs were stripped of a police force, local courts, local government, and most importantly, the Nauvoo Legion, which was a legislatively chartered city militia. Nauvoo was at that point dependent singularly upon the good graces of the County Sheriff for their only legal protection. The State Attorney, Josiah Lamborn, commented on this maneuver in a letter to Brigham Young:
I have always considered that your enemies have been prompted by political and religious prejudices, and by a desire for plunder and blood, more than for the common good. By the repeal of your charter, and by refusing all amendments and modifications, our legislature has given a kind of sanction to the barbarous manner in which you have been treated. Your two representatives exerted themselves to the extent of their ability in your behalf, but the tide of poplar passion and frenzy was too strong to be resisted. It is truly a melancholy spectacle to witness the law-makers of a sovereign State condescending to pander to the vices, ignorance and malevolence of a class of people who are at all times ready for riot, murder, and rebellion.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
http://books.google.com/books?id=PMAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=the+rise+and+fall+of+nauvoo&source
Vol. ? Friday, March 20, 1840. No. ?For the Register.
THE MOBBING SPIRIT OF MISSOURI REKINDLING IN ILLINOIS.The following is a statement of facts that may be relied on:
A short time since it was ascertained that a Mr. Clark, a member of the Methodist Episcopal church in Logan county, had in his possession the Book of Mormon. For this glaring outrage he was severely reprimanded, deprived of his station as a class leader, and the book demanded of him by his preachers, a Mr. Martin and a Mr. Watt.
He (the said Clark) contended that the book was his own property, and unless they bought it, they could not have the same. Accordingly, the necessary sum was raised, and paid for the book. Shortly after the said book was taken into De Witt county, to a Quarterly Conference meeting, there to await its final trial, and it was condemned, and burnt to ashes — the judges themselves being the executioners. And what is still more appalling, Mr. Watt, a preacher, has been heard unblushingly to assert, that if burning the book would not do, they would next burn the Mormons themselves. If testimony is required on this subject, it can be had at any time. AB’MPALMER.
Springfield, Ill., Mar. 12.
The Christian mobocracy had already secured the loyalty of most state and local officials before assassinating Joseph Smith. Some of it was willing, some of it reluctant, some active and some just key conspirators looking the other way at just the right moment. But there was one frustrating
exception; the County Sheriff, JB Backenstos, who insisted in upholding his oath of office, much to the mobocracy’s consternation. The Christian mob had however, insured that their version of the “truth” of their past, present, and future violence against the Mormons would get to the federal government, by electing one of Smith’s murderers, an indicted, first-hand participant in the Mormon founder’s execution via lynch mob at Carthage, to represent their state as a US Senator. State Attorney Lamborn had a bit to say about that as well:
Your senator, Jacob C. Davis, has done much to poison the minds of members [of Congress] against anything in your favor. He walks at large in defiance of the law an indicted murderer. If a Mormon was in his position, the senate would afford no protection, but he would be dragged forth to jail or the gallows, or be shot down by a cowardly and brutal mob.
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 345
The next thing the Hancock County Holy Conspirators did was rally a mass meeting of Christian crusaders at Quincy, 22 September of that year. In spite of frequent small-scale mobbing, looting, burning and other intimidations, Mormons were still hanging out in Nauvoo. They had committed to complete their first major temple before they left it to the heathen to be defiled, and in the meantime were using it to initiate and “endow” as many of the Saints as possible with covenants Mormons take upon themselves in the course of educational theatrical sketches essentially, stories told in formalized, ritual ceremonial form, which occur therein and only therein. An ad-hoc mob committee had already demanded to know the intentions of the Mormons remaining in the vicinity. The Mormons responded that their desire was to simply live in peace, but ultimately the entire body of the church had plans to relocate in the West. The Quincy committee issued a resolution on 24 September, containing a number of clauses, all of which demanded that the Mormons had to leave in the Spring, and that they were not to be allowed to prosecute criminally or civilly any accused old Christian settlers, and that these old Christian mobbers were to be allowed to return to Mormon areas, unmolested and unprosecuted for any crimes against the Mormons they admittedly may have committed. Josiah B Conyers, who wrote A Brief History of the Hancock Mob, commented on the first of these clauses:
The first one, in our opinion, is unique. They accepted and recommended to the people of the surrounding counties to accept an unconditional proposition to remove. But understand, Mr. Mormon, though we accept it and recommend the surrounding counties to do so likewise, (reprobate you, unconditionally) we do not intend to bring ourselves under any obligation to purchase your property, or to furnish purchasers; but we will be very kind and obliging, and will in no way, hinder or obstruct you in your efforts to sell, provided, nevertheless, this shall not be so construed as to prevent us from running off the purchaser. But we expect this small favor of you; viz., that you must dispose of your property, and leave at the appointed time.
–History of the Hancock Mob, Conyers, pgs 13, 14
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 353
The Quincy anti-Mormonists concluded their meeting by drafting a general military strategy for the forceful removal of Mormonism from their God-given lands. They appointed the leadership of a sizeable military contingent also organized thus to meet the challenge of violently contending with any Mormons foolish enough to linger or dawdle past their deadline.
As I have implied, the Quincy committee then met with a similar group at Carthage, and together rallied an even larger convention which was held at Carthage, comprising religious, law enforcement, civil, militia, and volunteer forces from all nine surrounding counties. The Carthage assembly adopted all the principle resolutions of the Quincy gathering, adding a litany of crimes and outrages charged against most of the Mormon leadership by way of justification for said expulsion of all Mormons from the state. There was one further enablement they demanded:
Resolved, that it is expected as an indispensable condition to the pacification of the county, that the old citizens be permitted to return to their homes unmolested by the present sheriff (Backenstos,) and the Mormons, for anything alleged against them; any attempt on their part to arrest or prosecute such persons for pretended offenses will inevitably lead to a renewal of the late disorder. [Meaning wholesale riot and warfare against the Mormons.]
–Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, pg 354
Having thus named Sheriff Backenstos personally, it was assumed he would back down from the nine-county threat. It was also moved that WN Purple, judge of the judicial circuit court be “requested” to withhold the fall session in Hancock County, on the grounds that opening the Mormon complaints against the old Christian settlers would again, result in open mob violence against the Mormons, so it was for their own protection. In this manner, Christianity had castrated the Sheriff, and if he dared arrest any of them, he now had no court and no judge to drag them to anyway. The only justice in southern Illinois was the mob.
The scene was brightly set for unfettered Christian fury to be released upon Mormondom, but that pesky sheriff, Backenstos, wouldn’t back off. And even in the regular State Militia’s ranks, the Mormons found many strong defenders. On 11 February, 1846, Brigham Young, the Twelve, and the High Council, made a show for the mobs of crossing the Mississippi on a fortuitous coating of ice, and made camp in distant Iowa. By the last of April, the main exodus had begun and the great majority of the Saints had vacated Nauvoo. Rather than easing the anticipation of the Christian defenders of liberty, and with the blessing of regional clergy, the mob saw no point in making even a token offer for what they could easily take by force, or inherit by default, simply by driving off the now greatly diminished body of Mormon stragglers.
An Illinois State Militia Major named Warren was commissioned to supervise Hancock County during this forced emigration process. He maintained peace with an even hand, but his orders had expected him to retreat from the vicinity once the main move had been completed. This news, he noted, was obviously of great anticipation amongst the old Christian settlers. He advised the governor that there was still a fair Mormon presence in the area and the wolves had begun to circle around them. His orders were changed to remain in defense of those Mormons who were attempting to pack up or sell the abandoned Mormon property. The problem was, a fair contingent of Mormons were to old or ill or broke to brave the trip immediately, and others had hoped to remain till the end of the summer to consummate their large number of pending sales and other business transactions, and protect personal, civic, church and communal property until it was sold or carted out. This short delay was too much for the old Christian mobbers. Again, they fell back into their old tricks of instigation and intimidation. Major Warren felt it necessary to put the mobs on notice by circulating a handbill:
The undersigned again deems it his duty to appear before you in a circular. It may not be known to all of you, that the day after my detachment was disbanded at Carthage, I received orders from the executive to muster them into service again, and remain in the county until further orders.
I have now been in Nauvoo with my detachment a week and can
say to you with perfect assurance that the demonstrations made by the Mormon population , are unequivocal. They are leaving the State, and preparing to leave, with every means that God and nature has placed in their hands. … The anti-Mormons desire the removal of the Mormons; this is being effected peaceably and with all possible dispatch. All aggressive movements, therefore, against them at this time, must be actuated by a wanton desire to shed blood, or to plunder. …
A man of near sixty years of age, living about seven miles from this place, was taken from his house a few nights since, stripped of his clothing, and his back cut to pieces with a whip, for no other reason than because he was a Mormon, and too old to make successful resistance. Conduct of this kind would disgrace a horde of savages. … To the Mormons I would say, go on with your preparations and leave as fast as you can. Leave the fighting to be done by my detachment. If we are overpowered, then recross the river, and defend yourselves and property.
The fighting in Nauvoo progressed rapidly to full-scale warfare with canon and ball on both sides. The State Militia split and fought itself, one faction with the Christian-sponsored mobs, one faction defending the Mormons.
The Ba
ttle of Nauvoo was the final chapter in the forceful expulsion of the Mormons from Nauvoo. The so-called Anti-Mormon Party, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the "Regulators," were bent on driving the remaining citizens out by force despite the well-known fact that most had gone and the rest were making plans to do so.
Some 600 to 1,000 strong, the Regulators were led first by Col. John Singleton and later by John Carlin of Carthage. The core of this unlawful mob was none other than the notorious Carthage Greys, who had played such a prominent role in the murders of Joseph and Hyrum two years before.
On the other side, two groups defended the city: the "Spartan Band" of heavily armed Latter-day Saints, and the "Kill Devils" made up of several of the so-called "new citizens," that is recent non-Mormon move-ins who had a vested interest in preserving property values.
Gov. Thomas Ford, sensing imminent conflict, commissioned Major James R. Parker of the 32nd Regiment of the Illinois State Militia to order all the would-be combatants to return to their homes and "preserve the peace." Parker, seeing the determination of Carlin’s force to wreak havoc on the city regardless of executive order, and sensing Ford’s reluctance to dispatch a large regiment of neutral militiamen, followed the course of political expediency by signing a treaty with Singleton which called for peace and disarmament. Singleton and Parker then quit the field and the Regulators chose Col. Thomas Brockman ("Old Tom") to finish what Singleton had refused to do.
On Sept. 10, 1846, Brockman ordered the first assault on the city comp
lete with cannon fire, driving families out of their homes and down toward the river. The first real exchange of volleys came two days later, on Sept. 12, and for the next four days the bell tower porch of the Nauvoo Temple served as an ideal perch from which to view the several forays and skirmishes across roadways, backyards and cornfields. Nauvoo’s defenders responded with cannon fire of their own. Despite a valiant resistance in which few men were killed on either side, by Sept. 16 the Nauvoo defenders had agreed to surrender the city.
The "Articles of Accommodation, Treaty and Agreement" – drawn up between the Nauvoo Trustees (John S. Fullmer, Almon W. Babbitt and Joseph L. Heywood) on the one side and Brockman and Carlin on the other and chaired by Andrew Johnson of the Quincy Committee) – stipulated the immediate surrender of the city and of all arms in return for a pledge of safety and protection for people and property. The defenders soon disbanded and about 3 p.m. on Sept. 17 the mob, numbering more than 1,500, marched into the city, down Mulholland Street to the temple, then to Main Street and down to Parley Street where Henry I. Young gave up the temple keys to Johnson.
The invaders, however, showed little respect for temple or treaty. Parties of armed men ransacked and desecrated the temple while others roamed around the city ordering families to leave within two hours or other short notice. Many of the sick were treated with cruelty and families were molested while burying their dead. Others went from house to house plundering cow yards, pigpens, hen roosts, and bee stands, tearing up floors and otherwise destroying property with impunity.
Meanwhile an unidentified preacher ascended the temple tower and proclaimed with a loud voice, "Peace, Peace, Peace to the inhabitants of the Earth, now the Mormons are driven."5
The Mormons never really had a prayer making friends anywhere in the Midwestern region. In the end, it was inevitable by sheer force of numbers, that the frontier politicians, Christian preachers, Godless capitalists out to make a buck, and their attendant, Scots-Irish, Tennessee enforcement mob would win. The entire area was ruled by hick mobs for generations afterward.
As Governor Thomas Ford, the man Mormons still claim set up their first prophet for mob execution summed it up:
I had a good opportunity to know the early settlers of Hancock county. I had attended the circuit courts there as States-attorney, form 1830, when the county was first organized, up to the year 1834; and to my certain knowledge the early settlers, with some honorable exceptions, were, in popular language, hard cases.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wZcontent/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
I won’t reiterate the whole history of Christian persecution of non-Christians. I won’t rehash the Christian persecution and common extermination of its own body–those deemed by the ruling Christian faction of the day to be heretical. That history speaks for itself and is certainly exposed adequately throughout my twenty-five previous essays in this seri
es. Mormons are not only outside any historical view of Christian orthodoxy but Joseph Smith personally insulted the entire world Christian community by telling them they had lost the plot. So all of organized religion, all of American Christianity, openly sanctioned the genocide of the “Mormon Race,” as it was often called. American Christianity’s jihad against Mormonism was an openly published mission, so well documented that any Christian attempting to dispute it makes a total ass out of himself without any help from me. (But I do what I can to help them out.)
Again, it’s not as if Mormons were the first victims of Christian vigilante justice in Illinois:
…As late as 1831 a gang almost controlled Pope and Massac counties, and even built a fort which had to be taken by storm by a small army of regulators. In 1837 occurred the better-known riots at Alton. A mob threw into the river the press of the Alton Observer, an Abolition newspaper published by Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy and a member of the mob were killed in a subsequent clash, and a second press destroyed. At about the same time Ogle, Winnebago, Lee and De Kalb counties all suffered from “organized bands of rogues, engaged in murders, robberies, horse-stealing, and in making and passing counterfeit money.
In 1841 in Ogle County a family of criminals named Driscoll shot down a Captain Campbell, of the respectables of the county, before the eyes of his family. Driscoll and one of his sons were convicted of the murder by a kangaroo court. “They were placed in a kneeling position, with bandages over their eye
s, and were fired upon by the whole company present, that there might be none who could be legal witnesses of the bloody deed. About one hundred of these men were afterwards tried for the murder and acquitted.
One would think that the violence at Carthage Jail in 1844 would have sickened the people of the state, but the conflicts that followed in Hancock county were by no means the only disturbances to trouble Governor ford. Another small civil war took place in Pope and Masaac counties in 1846. The militia of Union County, called in to keep the peace, refused to protect the suspected bandits and left the counties to the government of regulators, who, as always, began by terrorizing known criminals, moved to threatening the suspected, and ended hated and feared by honest and peaceful men.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Governor Ford again gives us an example of his “hard cases”:
A party of about twenty regulators went to the house of an old man named Mathis…. He and his wife resisted the arrest. The old woman being unusually strong and active, knocked down the one or two of the party with her fists. A gun was then presented to her breast accompanied by a threat of blowing her heart out if she continued her resistance. She caught the gun and shoved it downwards, when it went off and shot her through the thigh…. The party captured old man Mathis, and carried him away with them, since which time he has not been heard of, but is supposed to have been murdered.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
Who were these “regulators?” Well, it was a generation or two before the flour bags with holes cut into them, and perhaps three generations before the pointy hats and flaming crosses, but one could think of them as precursors to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—a little neo-regulator outfit that later on likewise bedeviled the LDS Church. And of course, niggers, Kikes, Papist bastards, thieving redskins, Freemasons, foreigners of all stripes, Abolitionists, and so forth. (In their own unvarnished words.)
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a terrorist organization[11] by veterans of the Confederate Army.[16] They named it after the Greek word kuklos, which means circle. The name means "Circle of Brothers."[17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1381.html
http://www.conspirazzi.com/?p=657
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00C11FC3859157493C0A81789D85F428584F9
http://www.sjsapush.com/ch4.php
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2009_summer_fall/regulators-movement-2.html
The KKK and these later frontier regulators are not to be confused with the original Regulator Movement, which actually began in 1760-1771, just before the American Revolution, as an uprising in North Carolina against corrupt colony officials. In South Carolina, around 1767, a group of farmers likewise organized an enforcement body to “regulate” back country affairs, which in their locale meant primarily ferreting out ruffians, highwaymen, thieves, and scoundrels of all sorts. Perhaps taking up the idea from North Carolinians, Yankee “regulators” essentially pulled off the Boston Tea Party. One of their chief features at the time was disguising themselves as Indians in the course of their dastardly deeds. One very famous “regulator” outfit was known as the “Sons of Liberty.”
Following the Regulator Movement in North Carolina (1766-1771), Sandy Creek Baptists played a key role in the tremendous growth of the Baptist denomination in the South, and their political beliefs influenced the changing views regarding the common man in America throughout the late eighteenth century.
While a noble effort on many levels, it was during this original regulator era that southern rednecks, Scots-Irish, mostly poor or working-class citizens, seemed to connect with a Calvinized Southern Baptist, Fundamentalist religious orientation, which in turn combined with a political belief that America was holy land set aside by God in which to build the ultimate, pure, Christian Nation. (An exclusively white, rednecked, Fundamentalist, slave-holding, Protestant Christian Nation that is.) Baptists had been persecuted from the Old 
World through the New England Colonial era, but in the American South, variants of this sect finally found a power-base amongst an ambitiously predatory class of generally disrespected “Ulster Scots,” or Protestant Irish, who had largely emigrated from Scotland to Ireland, and then on to the American colonies. Many of these immigrants left their homeland under dubious circumstances, and in general either never amounted to much in their homeland, were fleeing or being "transported" for criminal charges, or just desperate to escape hunger and poverty. They were keen converts to a message of the "American Dream," and a promised "Manifest Destiny."
By 1771 however, both the North and South Carolinian Regulators had been forcibly disbanded, more or less in deference to the greater power of the Crown and Tidewater Aristocracy. And here we have the Appalachian, East Tennessee, Born-Again connection to Mormon persecution appearing at its root: One of these groups of Regulators fled to what is now Tennessee, and there formed the Wautaga association from land leased from the Cherokee. They brought with them their own culture and tribal, shadow government. Their religious and civic orientation centered around a Christian Vigilante motif. To be expected, they soon stole all the rest of the Cherokee land in the region, with the help of fellow Scots-Irish, Calvinist rednecks like president Andrew Jackson. Then they stole all the land from all the Indians. Then they kicked out the Indians entirely–even the "civilized" and "Christianized" ones. It’s a pattern of behavior that is unmistakable in the Christian Nation, “Manifest Destiny” community. And when they’d filled Appalachia to brimming with themselves and their friends, they began to spread their self-“regulating” culture west to Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and everywhere ol’ "Hickory"Andrew Jackson’s favorite Scots-Irish rednecks eventually migrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/sons.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0851561.html
By the first few decades of the 1800’s, in the wild west of Missouri and southern Illinois, any altruistic,
patriotic notion of a “regulator” had entirely degenerated from its original ethical mission. The title had been appropriated by half-assed mobs, loosely directed by ad-hoc vigilance committees. Most of these were hangers-on to Christian Fundamentalist, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant-supremist, sometimes nativist cabals, most of them connected to pro-slavery movements, particularly pro-slavery Christian churches, intent upon dominating local politics. Until the Baptists showed up, most of these churches were Southern Presbyterian offshoots, Episcopal or Methodist/Episcopal, dissenters originally split off of the Church of England over a disagreement with the English Crown’s claim as head of the Church. Yes, and give the Southern Baptist Convention it’s due: most of the pro-slave, Fundamentalist, Biblically-justified Christian Nation rationale came from the Americanized, Southern Baptist/Redneck Regulator ideologies. They were highly motivating notions that found a wide base of approval in the New Christian World. Indeed, the Knights of the Golden Circle, America’s first genuine, nation-wide, home-grown vigilante hate group, began to organize in 1846 while the Mormons of Illinois were still bugging out. These pro-slavery, redneck mobs, became highly organized, secretive, and succeeded in infiltrating political bodies, police forces, and militias. Their tactics were most effective, and it is this secret order which is credited with spawning numerous, famous outlaw gangs both before and after the Civil War, effecting the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and later evolving into the KKK, among other things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle
The Warsaw Regulators for example, were in the core of the mob that stormed Carthage Jail to kill Joseph Smith. They, like all the other “regulators,” of the era, began as vigilante squads of bored farmers, ex-militia and militia with nothing to do for excitement, backslidden rabble along for the ride, and clandestine thugs just out for a thrill. Who directed them? Originally, their often murky direction came directly from the intimations of the good townsfolk as instructed usually by their Christian ministers. What was their original purpose? To clean up the lawless and pacify the region. Initially, this gave their otherwise, miserable, mundane or pointless lives a higher sense of purpose. And what did they do when they cleaned up the lawless and pacified the region? Well, they either annoyed the locals who had created them with their new-found skills of violence, terror and intimidation, which had to be kept honed, or the locals had to point them at some other form of “lawlessness” they could be assigned to clean up.
Enter the Mormons. If the local ministers all said Mormons were villains, confidence men, murderers and thieves, well, Mormons were fair targets. Indeed, Mormons were not only fair game according to period Christian authorities, they were mandated by God for extinction. The “regulators,” Al Qaeda of the era, didn’t need any more direction than that.
Of course, when they ran out of Mormons, the “regulators” had to find somebody else to harass. And they did. IE: Bleeding Kansas. And don’t let me give you the impression that the whole “regulator” concept and its attendant brutality was the exclusive patent of Southern, slave-holding rednecks, hicks, and hillbillies. John Brown is the most heroic, admired, Yankee Abolitionist figure in American history for instance:
"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done."
–John Brown, statement at his sentencing on Nov. 2, 1859"[John Brown is] that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,–the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross."
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his lecture "Courage," delivered in Boston on Nov. 8, 1859http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/johnbrown/brownhome.html
The same sort of pronouncements could have been, and indeed have been, made by Joseph Smith and other great Americans concerning Smith’s own struggles against redneck pro-slave Christianity. The difference between the heroic Abolitionist John Brown and Joseph Smith the Abolitionist Mormon heretic, is Smith was fighting both the Southern Born-Again mobs, while he was also being condemned for religious conflicts set up two generations earlier by the pious Northern Abolitionist Christians as well. The latter won the war with both of the former, and thus, Mormons and Johnny Rebs have been weighed as equal villains, equal traitors to the American cause in all official histories. But just how clean were the hands of Saint John Brown the Yankee Liberator, and his heroic, patriotic Christian crusade against slavery?
Brown and the free settlers were optimistic that they could bring Kansas into the union as a slavery-free state. But in late 1855 and early 1856 it was increasingly clear to Brown that pro-slavery forces were willing to violate the rule of law in order to force Kansas to become a slave state. Brown believed that terrorism, fraud, and eventually deadly attacks became the obvious agenda of the pro-slavery supporters, then known as "Border Ruffians." After the winter snows thawed in 1856, the pro-slavery activists began a campaign to seize Kansas on their own terms. Brown was particularly affected by the Sacking of Lawrence in May 1856, in which a sheriff-led posse destroyed newspaper offices and a hotel. Only one man, a Border Ruffian, was killed. Preston Brooks‘s caning of anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner also fueled Brown’s anger. These violent acts were accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion, and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims, and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose" (quoted in Reynolds, p. 162). Brown was outraged by both the violence of the pro-slavery forces, and also by what he saw as a weak and cowardly response by the antislavery partisans and the Free State settlers, who he described as "cowards, or worse" (Reynolds pp. 163–164).
Well, so far, John Brown hasn’t discovered anything the Mormons hadn’t long ago experienced first-hand from first, his old Puritan Pals back in New England, and later from the “Border Ruffians,” who later plagued Brown. These "ruffians" of course, were the selfsame hick, pro-slave, hillbilly rednecks from Missouri, who again, for the most part, emigrated originally from the Scots-Irish Tennessee “regulator” breeding stock. And how does the sainted Mr. Protestant Martyr Brown respond to this persecution?
Sometime after 10:00 pm May 24, 1856, it is suspected they [Brown and company] took five pro-slavery settlers – James Doyle, William Doyle, Drury Doyle, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman – from their cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords. Brown later claimed he did not participate in the killings, however he did say he approved of them.
[edit]Account of the Pottawatomie Massacre by John Doyle, Son of James P. Doyle
"I, John C. Doyle, was born in Knox County, Tennessee December 19, 1838. My father, Pleasant Doyle, moved to Walker County, Ga., in 1845, moved to Chattanooga in 1848, and lived in and around Chattanooga until October 11, 1855, at which time we moved to Kansas; traveled through the country in wagons, via Nashville, Hopkinsville, Ky., St. Louis, Mo., Kansas City, Mo., then fifty miles southwest to Franklin County, Kansas, arriving there November 18, 1856. We settled on a claim of one hundred and sixty acres, built a house, and spent the winter there. In the spring of 1856 we planted a crop. Everything was quiet and peaceful until the night of May 24, when John Brown, with about twenty-five men, came to the house and demanded admittance. When refused admittance, they set fire to the house with torches made of prairie hay. To keep up all from being burned to death my father opened the door. They came in the house and handcuffed my father and my two older brothers and started to take me but my mother begged them to leave me, as I would be all the protection she would have. Brown told mother they were going to take father and the boys to the army, and left the house with them. They took them about three hundred yards from the house and murdered them. My father was shot in the head, my brothers cut to pieces. They left them all dead in a heap. They then went over two miles further to Potawatma River and killed two more men by the names of Wilkerson and Sherman. After they had killed my father and brothers, some of Brown’s men came back to our house to get our horses, but failed to find them, as we had them staked out on the prairie to graze, as that was the way we had to feed them.
In John Brown’s defense, murdering, terrorist that he is, the men he and his thugs dragged out of their homes
and chopped up at Pottowottomie, apart from their homespun agricultural activities, were also probably in the habit of riding around the countryside all night with a pack of their friends, and similarly brutalizing Abolitionists–when they weren’t lynching or horsewhipping niggers to keep them in their place. Like the Fancher Party of Mountain Meadows fame, the conception of these victims of Brown’s violence as simple, honest farmers is highly subjective. Even my characterization of them as hillbilly, rednecked hicks is something of an anachronism. In the day, mobbing Indians, perverts, and Mormons, lynching niggers, burning presses and killing Abolitionists, was a mainstream, patriotic, Christian activity. It wasn’t society’s imbeciles, the inherently violent or the idiot-cousins in the culture that were instigators of this behavior. It was rather, the very God-fearing, simple country farmers with wives and families and dreams of success in America, we keep hearing about from their defenders. That’s who the "Regulators" were at the core of it all.
Most of the politics the Mormons found themselves embroiled in during their attempted settlement of what is now the American Midwest, had less to do with Mormonism per-se, and more to do with getting them out of the way so Christianity could fight with itself. I know I’ve titled my ramblings “Religion for Mormons and other Idiots,” but even an idiot should be able to see a number of consistent themes in the way Christians abuse one-another. For all the anti-Mormon "outrages" alluded-to by the rednecked mobs, their authorizing ministers, civil officials and their lackey press, for all their bemoaning of the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, and despite
their claims of treason and rebellion, in reality, in this era, destroying presses you disagreed with politically or religiously was a common American Christian practice. And when Christians wrecked a press historically, they nearly always killed the proprietors and authors of the writings they wanted suppressed. Just like the Inquisition did. Just like Calvin did. Just like the Church of England and nearly every other State-Church did.
Christian mob-militias didn’t just innovatively start to hack up and blow the heads off men and boys, or rape and pillage Mormon settlements like Haun’s Mill, Far West, or Nauvoo because they feared a hideous Mormon threat. This wasn’t a unique, reactive modality spawned out of some extraordinarily frightening sense of Mormon imposition upon American Christian sensibilities. Christianity has been hacking and raping and torturing and slaughtering itself up for centuries, millennia. The Quincy Committee, the Nauvoo Committee, the Mob Manifesto authors, these Christian “patriots” didn’t just put together their own “Secret Constitutions,” out of a singlular desperation to justify ignoring the law, reason, and common sense to achieve their political and social dominance. There is nothing unique at all in this pattern of Christian oppression, in the New World or the Old, in Roman Catholic circles or Protestant. Even John Brown, the "enlightened" Abolitionist, Yankee “good guy” drafted up a “Provisional Constitution” to ennoble his rebellion and butchery. That’s what Christians do. That’s a system of belief exposing its true nature for two-thousand years now.
But what do Mormons believe in this regard you may ask? And well you may. It’s almost as if I was leading you up to this:
…But if any man is authorized to take away my life because he says I am a false teacher, then upon the same principle I am authorized to take away the life of every false teacher, and where would be the end of blood? And who would not be the sufferer? But no man is authorized to take away life because of a difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate, right or wrong….
Do not insult your own intelligence as well as mine by refusing to admit by now that apart from the claim of heresy, the whole Mormon
era from Missouri to the Civil War, was politically dominated by a rather different religious question. One faction of Christianity believed the Bible had cursed the negro to an eternity of slavery, and another faction of Christianity determined that the Bible decreed slavery to be a primitive and barbaric practice. This was not in essence a political argument, except insofar as both Christian factions declared themselves to be the exclusive interpreters of both Biblical and Constitutional dogma, and that all other religious or political views were therefore detrimental to a pure Christian State in America. This is no more or less than warring Christian factions have always done. In this argument, while Joseph Smith was clearly an Abolitionist, by also claiming to be a prophet, his social and political righteousness earned the Latter-day Saints no friends on either side of this pressing American question. Mormonism was simply in the road, the common enemy of all, so and thus both the regressive, ignorant, Bible-thumping, slave-whipping rednecks, and the pious, "enlightened" educated, Beattitudinal Yankees hit Mormonism with everything they had. The Mormon wars were essentially but a practice run for a bigger and better war these American Christian factions already had festering between themselves, already impatiently pencilled in at the back of their Manifest Destiny planning schedule.
One cannot concede that Abolitionist, Northern, American Christianity–led first by the Whigs and then the new Republican Party, was any kinder to Mormonism than Southern, pro-slavery Christianity–led by the Democrat Party. It was however, the extreme, daily, misfortune of the Latter-day Saints to find that it was the latter, coarser, less-sophisticated branch of their Christian persecutors that they constantly found themselves rubbing community elbows with. And even after finding something of a haven for themselves in Utah, eventually the worst of the Appalachian rednecks, first in the form of Baptist and Methodist reformers who followed the US invasion forces into the Territory, and then in the form of three generational incarnations of the KKK, all spun from East Tennessee’s “regulator” heritage, who likewise migrated themselves and their ideologies all the way to Utah, and again listed Mormonism as their worst enemy, and again did their best to incriminate, irritate, and hopefully eradicate Mormonism.
As a persecuted minority, it’s today far easier for Mormonism to institutionally euphemize its persecutors into
some nameless, generically evil, faceless mob. The devil made them do it. Satan hardened their hearts. That way Mormons can still pretend they’re all brothers and sisters in Christ with their contemporary “Christian” neighbors. For their part however, their Christian neighbors will only believe this if for some fluke reason they posses a shred of inherent inspiration and enlightenment from Christ Himself. Any good will and brotherhood from that source however, will vanish in a puff of dogma the second they are corrected by their “orthodox” Christian clergies. None of the essential Christian sects and doctrines have so centrally changed their core beliefs since their days of indiscriminately killing off opponents, that they don’t still count Mormons as Godless heretics and Satanic pawns—and this at a minimum. That rhetoric may be embarrassing to mainstream Christians today, but it remains essential Christian orthodoxy. In 1844 it was the common language of the pulpit and press. The day after the Expositor was destroyed by Nauvoo’s city council, this is the Christian response, drafted at the very first preliminary meeting of Christian civic leadership on the news, before any clear facts had been established:
Resolved…that we hold ourselves at all times in readiness to cooperate with our fellow citizens in this state, Missouri, and Iowa, to exterminate – UTTERLY EXTERMINATE, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles.
Resolved…that the time, in our opinion, has arrived when the adherents of Smith as a body, shall be driven from the surrounding settlements into Nauvoo; that the Prophet and his miscreant adherents should be demanded at their hands, and if not surrendered, A WAR OF EXTERMINATION SHOULD BE WAGED, To the entire destruction if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.
http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V04N02_43.pdf
This is an honest, heartfelt, unapologetic, naked and untempered Christian demand for immediate, heretical Mormon blood–through any means and at any cost to law and society. This is the Christian mission statement that anti-Mormonists will never show you. This is the Christian charter that killed Joseph Smith. And for what? Was it prompted by some overt, impending, even if reciprocal Mormon threat? Was it because Joseph Smith, like the heroic, famed crusader for human liberty, the Christian Yankee Abolitionist John Brown, 
took a few "regulators" to the homes of his nearest political antagonists, dragged them off, shot them in the head, hacked them to pieces, and then left the bodies piled in a heap at the end of the driveway for their victims’ surviving wives and children to deal with? Or, if Christianity now declares Joseph Smith devilish and evil for discretely taking more than one woman to bed–as if this was ever anyone’s business but his own and that of the women who willingly shared his nocturnal companionship–was even this the excuse raised for his assassination? No, by their own admission, the Christian lynch mob that killed Joseph Smith did so as a reply to a disputed Nauvoo City Council decision concerning the operation of a printing press.
Those with any insight at all will immediately recognize in anti-Mormonism, all the key historically Christian rhetoric and stereotypical charges hurled against the Jews throughout their history of persecution: wicked, bloodthirsty, monopolizing all the goodies, keep to themselves, cheat the Gentiles, out to kill Christians and take their stuff, out to steal women, drink the blood of infants and virgins in Satanic secret rituals, bla bla bla…
The “orthodox” or “Historical” Christian political agenda screams from the media still today, even if largely muzzled and tamed out of necessity in "mainstream" congregations by a higher level of public enlightenment than in Joseph Smith’s day. But at the end of the day, it was the victorious, Yankee Calvinists who won their last bloody laugh, first at the Southern redneck slave-holders, and when those Godless Rebel bastards had been put in their place, they turned finally back to the Mormons they rediscovered hiding from their pious wrath out in Utah. The Rebel hillbillies we all know, got their comeuppance at the end of a massive national military battle the Yankee victors now call the "Civil War." The Mormons, well, the forces of "enlightened" Christianity finally found a way to beat them into humility as well. It took patience and finesse, but eventually they did with the stroke of a pen what they had failed to do from Palmyra to Salt Lake City by fire and sword.
And now the game is well afoot. On to Utah. in the words of the late-great Irish Republican Army: Do and say nothing ‘till you hear more.
Mormon Wars Part 2: Prelude to a Storm
There were several Mormon Wars. They all arose at the point where local Christian clergies competing unsuccessfully with Mormonism, sold their congregations and attendant, backslidden community rabble, on the proposition that Mormons were aiming to take over and supersede their God-given, inalienable rights as American Christians. The Mormons it was claimed, in each of these cases, would then enforce their own morality instead of state and federal law and authority. They would allow only their own to do business or prosper. Naturally, this is how the professional Christian clergy would have seen the situation, since that is exactly what they intended to do, and ultimately did.
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/themes/problem.html
In Missouri, The Mormon War of 1838, the main problem was simply that Mormons were on the verge of out-voting old Christian settlers. Fistfights broke out as old Christian settlers tried to drive Mormons from the polls. The Mormons slugged their way in to vote anyway. The Christians came back with guns. The Mormons also had guns. The Mormons were better shots and the old Christian settlers cried “rebellion” to the governor. The governor issued an order of extermination. A storm of Mormon-killing ensued.
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/danites_p8.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2600286/posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/history/danites_eom.htm
In Nauvoo Illinois, the Mormon War of 1844, Joseph Smith and the city council ordered a small portion of the city’s defense forces to destroy an anti-Mormon printing press, the Nauvoo Expositor, that had set up under their noses. Anti-Mormonists seldom mention that its operators, along with some valid “inside” exposure of legitimately alarming doctrinal developments centered around plural marriage, were transparently using this claim to journalism and a dedication to “truth” as a pretext for rather a lot of base name-calling and bold, inflammatory assertion that Joseph Smith was the devil incarnate and a bloodthirsty murderer. The paper’s content was fueled by
excommunicated Mormons, many of whom had sought and gained some sort of 
privileged status amongst Joseph Smith’s organization, and had then taken improper liberties with that status–sexual, financial, and at various times, as did Sampson Avard, via organizing secret vigilante sub-groups to defend and avenge the Saints, which they then claimed had been authorized by Smith himself. After excommunication, I repeat, only after excommunication–an excommunication that each and all of them begged to avoid amid great public confession–several, like William Law, attempted to start their own churches, and others, like the allegedly syphilitic Francis Higbee, his randy brother Chauncy, or the ex-Mayor William Bennett, former Methodist minister, university founder, abortionist, and all-‘round manipulative sociopath, soon abandoned splitting off their own religious empires from Joe Smith’s flock, dove headlong into the anti-Mormon business, and after some success with a lecture-circuit, intended to fully monetize their Joe-Smith pay-back enterprises with the Nauvoo Expositor. And just to rub Joe’s nose in it, they set up right downtown Nauvoo. Sampson Avard became a star witness in subsequent hearings after Joseph Smith’s assassination, maintaining a brief celebrity by inventing tales of the fanciful “Danite” bands of conspiratorial marauders that became the subjects of dime novels for generations, and remain a staple of anti-Mormonism today.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Governor Thomas Ford, in his history of Illinois, styles Bennett “probably the greatest scamp in the western country.” But this was not until long after the Mormons, thrice victimized, had become aware of his villainy.
The Nauvoo Expositor published exactly one edition before the new Mayor Smith and his city council fell for the bait, and did exactly what the Expositor’s owners probably wanted them to do. They condemned and destroyed the press as a public nuisance. This was admittedly a marginal end-run around the First Amendment.
http://restorationbookstore.org/articles/nopoligamy/jsfp-vol1/chp11.htm
When anti-Mormon riots broke out all over the county in protest, Smith called out the city’s state-chartered militia to defend the town’s interests. This too, was probably the anti-Mormon coalition’s hoped-for reaction. Unfortunately for Smith, by then the mobs were made up in good part by the Illinois State Militia from Carthage and elsewhere, and mobbers from Missouri and Iowa who had been rallied by the anti-Mormon press of another regional rabble-rouser, Thomas Sharp, of the Warsaw Signal. 
The Expositor’s cadre of wounded parties maintained that Smith’s use of the Legion to destroy the press constituted a riot and wanted His Honor the Mayor criminally indicted for inciting it. They claimed the use of the Legion to destroy a press, and prevent its owners from defending it was treasonous, and in fact, when the anti-Mormon Mob/Militia hit Nauvoo, they maintained that declaring martial law in response to this incursion was treasonous, because at least some element of the murderous throng was there on official state business. In spite of several local court hearings and dismissals of the matter, the Expositor’s defenders then claimed Smith had overthrown all civil law by force of the Legion and cried to Thomas Ford, the governor. The Warsaw Signal broadcast these inflated charges throughout the region, and eventually the nation.
- It should be the firm determination of every one holding in veneration the institutions of the country, upon the first outrage against a citizen of this county, to give those “Latter-day Devils,” a scathing that will eclipse the “Missouri Persecutions,” or in other words, Missouri Justice.
- …Yes Joe! we have that confidence in your saintship, that we do not believe that the concentrated extract of all the abominations of the Infernal Regions, can add one stain to the blackness of your character. Look in a mirror Joe and you will see the reflection of the most detestable wretch that the earth contains.
In advocating force, Sharp appealed to the primitive law of communal self-defense that had authorized mob actions from the Revolution to the killing of the abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, ironically the same principle underlying the wrecking of the Expositor. The theory that a community had the right to enforce its will against impending danger had authorized vigilantism and lynchings in one community after another in every section of the nation. Relying on it to make his case, Sharp was sure of support when on June 12 he called for Joseph’s assassination and the extermination of the Mormons.
–Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
By Richard Lyman Bushman, Jed Woodworth
Ford was faced with a state-wide revolt by the anti-Mormon factions, and persuaded 
Smith to surrender himself and disarm the Legion while he investigated the validity of the charge of inciting to riot. When they showed up in nearby, allegedly neutral ground in Carthage to surrender, they were instead charged with treason.
The same State Militia that the governor had called in to keep order and protect the prisoners, the fiercely anti-Mormon Carthage Greys, had joined forces with the Mormon-hating Warsaw Regulators, and other travelling mobs like the one known as “Moses’ Fire Insurance Company,” famed for burning out Mormons, and had openly sworn to kill Smith for sure this time. Having been repeatedly warned of these threats, governor Ford brushed off the danger, and left Carthage to further “investigate” the situation, saying “The people are not that cruel.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ford_(politician)
As soon as the governor and his personal force was out of town, rather than wait for a hearing, the mob-militia coalition stormed the jail dressed as Indians, and shot Joseph Smith and his brother down like dogs. In a few days, after it appeared there would be no retaliation from the Mormons, the mob then progressed to assaulting Mormon out-settlements, and eventually besieged Nauvoo, culminating in a full militia cannon assault. Other factions of the State Militia, apparently still loyal to the state and national constitutions, sided with the Mormons and helped defend the city. It didn’t end well for the Mormons however, and they eventually were driven from the state in the dead of winter, landing in Utah at the end of a white man’s trail of tears 
not unlike the original Native American version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nauvoo,_Illinois
The state of Illinois officially apologized for its treatment of the Mormons in 2004. This is particularly since later investigation proved that the fatal shots had almost certainly been inflicted upon Joseph Smith by the Carthage Greys, his State Militia guards. Missouri issued an official apology in 1976. Christian excuse-makers however, are still unwilling to concede any culpability in the matter. Many Christian ministries are dedicated specifically to rationalizing both the Missouri extermination order, the expulsion from Illinois, and of course, the last and most significant of these anti-Mormon melees, these military and para-military engagements between Christian crusaders and Mormon defenders, the Armageddon of Mormon Wars, the Utah Mormon War of 1857.
http://contenderministries.org/mormonism/illinoisevents.php
http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/_PDFArchives/apologetics/AP1W0604.pdf
http://www.rickross.com/reference/mormon/mormon320.html
http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/u/UTAHWAR.html
http://frontierhistory.blogspot.com/2008/07/thomas-leiper-kane-utah-mormon-war-of.html
http://solomonspalding.com/docs/exposit1.htm
In 1847, Brigham Young succeeded the assassinated Joseph Smith and fled the raging, armed extermination effort centered around the then premier Mormon metropolis, Nauvoo Illinois. He landed in the Utah Valley and in ten years had built a major city in the desert, and an entirely self-sufficient greater community all around the Great Basin and Intermountain West. (Las Vegas was originally a Mormon supply stop for example.)
Originally, Young formed a provisional State of Deseret, out of a large portion of disput
ed, and mostly abandoned Mexican territory. (The Mormons had in fact been enlisted by the US government to form an army battalion, the “Mormon Battalion” to defend US interests in the disputed region and win the area for the United States.) Young’s long-term plan was to apply for US statehood and almost immediately made applications for same. Allowing Mormons majority control over their own state however, a state blocking a strategic corridor connecting the new east and west coasts, was seen by Congress to be extremely undesirable. Young however, believed that under Constitutional law statehood would allow them great autonomy and protection from further Christian persecution. Instead, Congress created Utah Territory, which could then be administered directly by Congress, particularly regarding appointing governors and other high officers.
http://www.mormonbattalion.com/Armyofthewest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Battalion
Mormons wanted a state, they wanted autonomy. But the Mormons took what they could get, and Utah Territory was formed. Mormonism adapted to and overcame the desert, and spread itself out along supply and support lines from one end of the country to the other.
As much as Christian settlers from Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and points east, all claimed they wanted nothing to do with Mormonism, no sooner had the Mormons opened up the Intermountain West, than the same hick Bible-thumpers who were ready to fight Mormonism to the death in Missouri or Illinois, the same bare-footed yokels who drove Mormonism out of the Midwest, were loading up their guns and Bibles into wagons and following the Mormons out to Utah. They also seemed keen to check out that gold discovery two members of the Mormon Battalion found in California at Sutter’s Mill, while taking a break after their hitch in the army. The Baptists and Methodists in particular, Mormonism’s old friends from Missouri, made it an official point to recruit good Christian armies of missionary invasion and help them emigrate to Utah, California, Nevada, anywhere the Mormons settled, to secure the territory for Jesus.
Ten years into Mormonism’s taming of the wilderness in their Utah hideout, the goal of Mormonism’s Christian enemies back in Washington had evolved into a frantic effort to prevent Mormonism from gaining the slightest toe-hold anywhere in the nation. The entire continent had to be kept safe for Christianity.
Political, military, and cultural hostilities erupted in 1857-58 when President James Buchanan
fulfilled an 1855-56 campaign promise to suppress Mormons and sent the United States military to occupy Utah in what is now known as the “Utah War.” Mormons regarded this as a violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [which had formed the territory out of Mexican land] and an attempt to renew the campaign of violence against Mormons that had occurred in Missouri and Illinois. Mormons felt that they no longer had anywhere new to migrate, and that they had to stand their ground. It was during this period, on September 11, 1857, that a controversial incident known as the “Mountain Meadow Massacre” occurred in which some resentful Mormons and Piute Indians killed a group of civilian settlers passing from Arkansas to California via Utah.
Most movers and shakers in American politics pandered to rabid Christian constituencies like the Temperance Movement only because they could still get a drink in any backroom gin joint they wanted anyway. But looking pro-Temperance automatically gained them the massively organized WASP Temperance vote. So too, in their days of glory, did pandering to the anti-Mormonists gain you a similarly solid block of votes, essentially the same block of votes as the Temperance vote, whatever your personal feelings on Mormonism might actually be. In any case, there was
money to be made in Utah. There were contracts and infrastructure the Mormons would otherwise use to benefit themselves and build their own powerbase. Politicians and military leaders found that falling into the company of the good Christian forces of anti-Mormonism, humoring them, giving them what they wanted, was a sure-fire promotion and vote-getter.
For the Yankee, Abolitionist, Christian vote-getter, there was the Republican Party, founded on the platform that it would abolish the “Twin Relics of Barbarism: Slavery and Polygamy.” James Buchanan was a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies called a “doughface” in period slang. Democrats courted Southern and States-Rights Christians by also swearing to eradicate the Mormon blight immediately upon election. The slavery issue could wait they said. They were also promising the Ozark/Appalachian rabble in the east, free land in the opening west.
The closest rival to the dominant Democrat Party at the time was the “Know Nothing” party, alternately called the “American Republican Party,” the “Native American Party,” and “American Party,” the “Know Nothing nickname referring to a secret-society contingent to said party. The “Know Nothings” were formed at the collapse of the old Whig Party, as by then long-established American-born Protestants sounded the call to stop the immigration and infiltration of American Protestant purity by German and Irish Roman Catholics. The party culminated itself in a number of acts of anti-Catholic violence, sabotage and riots back east, and then split apart over the slavery issue, sending pro-slave Protestant Nativists to the Democrats, and Abolitionist Protestant Nativists to the new Republican Party.
For all of these dominant parties and political orientations, the Mormons fulfilled every qualification of the perfect boogeyman. They had a Pope-like prophet. They had secret vengeance societies-or so it was claimed by their defectors. They were taking all the free land out west and claiming they’d have it all eventually, for their private Zion. For the Nativists, Mormons were mass-recruiting foreigners to immigrate. For the pro-slave Southern hicks they were all just a bunch of smartassed Yankee Abolitionists. For the pious North and South, they weren’t Christians, and they weren’t even Catholics. They weren’t even that close to being acceptable American citizens.
The problem was, Mormons had become a huge voting block as well. Pleasing the Mormons gave you an election in their areas. For a while, the Whig party played the anti-Mormon card, and Democrats toyed with their affections. When the Mormons did not prove reliable, when candidates had to deal individually with each Mormon community issue-by-issue, when Joseph Smith formed his own presidential candidacy, and pledged the Mormons would only support their friends of whatever party, the decision was taken to simply eliminate the Mormon puzzle from the political equation rather than attempt to court this fickle, if substantial, group of unreliable constituents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Republican_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
http://kaystreet.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/a-brief-history-of-intolerance-in-america/
President James Buchanan was a Presbyterian from Pennsylvania, a founding stronghold of the Know Nothings, and member of the first sect to become a sworn enemy of Joseph Smith and his Mormon church from its earliest days in the “Burned Over District” of New York’s revival era. He had his nose firmly suckled into the butt-cheeks of both the Southern pro-slavery and the anti-Mormon Movements. He’s also often cited in lists of the top-ten worst US presidents:
In his inaugural speech, Buchanan stated that the slavery issue was of “little practical importance” because the Supreme Court was about to settle it. Two days later they announced the Dred Scott decision in which it ruled that people of African descent, whether or not they were slaves, could never be citizens of the United States, and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. Buchanan was widely believed to have been personally involved in the outcome of the case. Additionally, Buchanan’s administration was troubled by the Panic of 1857 – a sudden downturn in the US economy. Before Buchanan left office, seven slave states seceded, the Confederacy was formed, all arsenals and forts in the seceded states were lost (except Fort Sumter and two remote ones), and a fourth of all federal soldiers surrendered to Texas troops. Historians in 2006 voted his failure to deal with secession the worst presidential mistake ever made.
Under previous president Pierce, one of the throng of good Christian profiteers to seek his cash-cow in Utah
Territory, was a man named McGraw. WMF McGraw had been awarded the mail contract for the Territory, but apparently wasn’t very reliable or swift in his postal obligations. He’d hoped to make the line profitable from passenger trade, but Brigham Young as governor and head of the Mormon church, already had a superior personnel transport and supply line set up in all directions to facilitate the ongoing Mormon emigration, supply, and construction efforts. Young concluded McGraw’s contract was a waste of time and money and awarded the new mail contract to fellow Mormons who were already engaged in the far more developed and reliable Mormon transportation efforts.
Most federal appointees got along well with Governor Young and Mormon society. But McGraw went screaming back to Washington as part of a small coven of partisan officials and others had gone to Utah either to get rich, or under the intention of heeling Brigham Young and his Mormon heretics to become the faithful dogs of American Christian rule. All of these disaffected parties were particularly upset that period Mormons lived as an almost socialist community, dealt generously and forgivingly with their brethren, and yet stuck it to the Gentiles at every opportunity like capitalist bastards. (As opposed to the current Mormon culture in which BYU cranks out hundreds of Mormon MBA’s every year, each of which makes it his goal to see just how much cash he can screw out of the faithful all along the Wasatch Front, so he can build the biggest house on the highest bench in Provo.) Much of the offence federal officers in Utah Territory took from trying to rule a bunch of Mormons, came down to Brigham Young’s flock cramping their style in the grafting, drinking, and whoring departments. Even today, grafting, drinking, and whoring are still considered in some camps to be principal benefits of any high office, but back then, it was a way of life. As a result of this combined, sudden flurry of complaints, President Pierce nullified the Mormon contract and effectively cut off all communication to and from the territory as a result.
According to LDS historians James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, the most influential information came from William W. Drummond, an associate justice of the Utah territorial supreme court who began serving in 1854. Drummond’s letter of resignation of March 30, 1857 contained charges that Young’s power set aside the rule of law in the territory, that the Mormons had ignored the laws of Congress and the Constitution, and that male Mormons acknowledged no law but the priesthood.
- He further charged the Church with murder, destruction of federal court records, harassment of federal officers, and slandering the federal government. He concluded by urging the president to appoint a governor who was not a member of the Church and to send with him sufficient military aid to enforce his rule.[24]
This account was further supported by Territorial Chief Justice Kinney in reports to Washington, where he recited examples of what he believed to be Brigham Young’s perversion of Utah’s judicial system and further urged his removal from office and the establishment of a one-regiment U.S. Army garrison in the territory.[25]
There were further charges of treason, battery, theft, and fraud made by other officials including Federal Surveyors,[26] and Federal Indian Agents.[27]
Furniss states that most federal reports from Utah to Washington “left unclear whether the [Mormons] habitually kicked their dogs; otherwise their calendar of infamy in Utah was complete.”[28]
Fulfilling his campaign promises, newly elected president James Buchanan eagerly embraced the opportunity
to send a large army out to suppress this imagined rebellion, and Congress appointed a new Christian governor, Alfred Cumming, who travelled with the army, presuming that he would have to be installed by force of arms. This little adventure became known as “Buchanan’s Blunder.” It ultimately bankrupted the national treasury and after only a few years of debauched army occupation of Mormon country, circumstances found Andrew Johnston 
and a lot of his troops and officers, seceding from the Union and making war upon the Constitution wholesale, leaving the North entirely broke and poorly able to meet the Southern rebellion.
Johnston died at the battle of Shiloh in 1862, a Confederate officer.
As a new president, Abraham Lincoln found himself the sole defender of the Constitution and this effort crippled by 40 million dollars of pointless Utah War debt, an unheard of sum at the time. Most of it was squandered on pay, feed, contracts and whorehouses intended to keep the Christian forces of civilization in the Utah Expedition comfortable. When the Union needed troops immediately along the Potomac at the outbreak of civil war, most of the Union army was bivouacked in Cedar Valley Utah, exiled to that remote wasteland southwest of Salt Lake City by mutual agreement of Brigham Young and the new Christian governor Cumming to keep the army and its accompanying rabble out of town.
In Camp Floyd, near present-day Fairfield and Cedar Fort, Johnston’s army immediately built their own camp-follower subdivision of whorehouses, gambling dens and taverns, called ” Frog Town.” Brigham Young complained that before the Christian forces of “civilization” had invaded them, there hadn’t been a single murder and scarcely a violent crime in the territory for ten years, and since the Christian invasion, they were dealing with multiple fights, shootings, theft, robbery and other crimes almost daily.
When Lincoln recalled the Utah Expedition, a good portion of his troops took the free ride back east and the
n deserted immediately to fight for the Confederacy. The Utah Expedition was in short, a major boondoggle. There were no military engagements. Brigham Young welcomed the new governor openly and immediately. The army on the other hand, was bottled up and harassed all winter in a hellishly cold canyon while Mormon guerrillas burned their supply wagons, scattered their livestock, and cut them off from all communications. After protracted negotiation they were allowed to enter the valley, but only to pass through—to be forced to camp in a rocky back-valley fifty miles away from Salt Lake City. Nothing much else happened until the Civil War broke out. After some three years and nearly forty-million dollars, Johnston’s Army had succeeded only in bringing Utah Territory its first whorehouse, a string of grog shops, and a jail.
All the comforts of Christian society.
On June 19, the New York Herald summarized the non-engagement: “Killed, none; wounded, none; fooled, everybody.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/brink-of-war.html#ixzz1bRrYTvoZ
http://frontierhistory.blogspot.com/2008/07/thomas-leiper-kane-utah-mormon-war-of.html
In 1857, as Andrew Johnston’s army was marching on Utah to make its Mormon population submit to Christian Biblical convention and political rule, the Mormon and Native American victims of years of bigoted American Christian persecution, converged at a place called “Mountain Meadows” to have it out with what they perceived to be a company of American Christian bigots who had declared war on them. This culminated in one-hundred and twenty allegedly docile and innocent Christians being shot, speared, and beaten to death by a group of Indians and Mormons who had apparently finally taken just about enough of their crap. That’s the short explanation. But brevity isn’t everything. I’ll elaborate.
In the first Mormon War of 1838, most Christian apologists openly confess that Christian forces in Missouri and Illinois authored a “Secret Constitution,” or “Mob Manifesto” in which they openly declared a war of extermination on Mormonism. They contend however, that Mormons also issued a declaration of war on Christianity. This is popularly confused with the “Salt Sermon,” which actually only compared apostate Mormons to salt that has lost its savor, and ominously invited apostates to stop making trouble for the church and find somewhere else to live. The speech actually in question, was delivered on July 4th, 1838, and anti-Mormon forces use it to this day as an excuse for Missouri Governor Lilburn W Boggs’ “Extermination Order,” issued months later in the same year. The chronology of course is backwards, and Christian apologists always neglect to mention the many expressions of inspiring, patriotic tribute to the United States Constitution that precede the one paragraph or two they always quote from this so-called Mormon “declaration of war”:
In celebrating this, the anniversary of our independence, all party distinctions should be forgotten, all religious differences should be laid aside. We are members of one common republic, equally dependent on a faithful execution of its laws, for our protection, in the enjoyment of our civil, political, and religious privileges. All have a common interest in the preservation of the Union, and in defense and support of the constitution. Northern, southern, and western interests, ought to be forgotten, or lost for the time being, in the more noble desire to preserve the nation, as one whole; for on this depends the security of all local and sectional interest; for if we cannot preserve them by supporting the Union, we cannot by rending it in pieces. In the former there is hope, in the latter fear, in one peace, in the other war.
…
All attempts, on the part of religious aspirants, to unite church and state, ought to be repealed with indignation, and every religious society supported in its rights, and in the exercise of its conscientious devotions. The Mohameden, the Pagan, and the Idolater, not excepted, and be partakers equally, in the benefits of the government. For if the Union is preserved, it will be by endearing the people to it; and this can only be done by securing to all their most sacred rights. The least deviation, from the strictest rule of right, on the part of any portion of the people, or their public servants, will create dissatisfaction, that dissatisfaction will end in strife, strife in war, and war, in the dissolution of the Union.
…
Next to the worship of our God, we esteem the education of our children and of the rising generation. For what is wealth without society, or society without intelligence. And how is intelligence to be obtained?–by education. It is that which forms the youthful mind: it is that alone, which renders society agreeable, and adds interest and importance, to the worship of God. What is religion without intelligence!–an empty sound. Intelligence is the root, from which all true enjoyments flow. Intelligence is religion, and religion is intelligence, if it is any thing. Take intelligence from it, and what is left? a name–a sound without meaning. If a person desires to be truly pious in the sight of God, he must be purely intelligent. Piety without intelligence, is fanaticism, and devotion without understanding, is enthusiasm.
[A not very subtle jab at the fundamentalist hicks and apostates persecuting them.]
…
We take God and all the holy angels to witness this day, that we warn all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come on us no more forever, for from this hour, we will bear it no more, our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man or the set of men, who attempts it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seal of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed. –Remember it then all MEN.
We will never be the aggressors, we will infringe on the rights of no people; but shall stand for our own until death. We claim our own rights, and are willing that all others shall enjoy theirs.
(Emphasis is mine.)
This sermon was delivered by Sidney Rigdon, First Counselor in the LDS presidency, and authorized by Joseph Smith, its primary author. There is in fact, nothing whatsoever in it that implies disloyalty to Constitutional law or the United States. There is nothing whatsoever in this that suggests anything other than a commitment to “no longer tamely submit” to lawless persecution. This we are told by Mormon critics, was authored and presented as gospel to the general LDS membership directly by the LDS First Presidency in the name of founding prophet Joseph Smith, on the Fourth of July, 1838. How then, some twenty years later, had this same organization’s leaders changed their minds entirely about their patriotic and political orientation? How is it that in 1857, Brigham Young suddenly figured it would be a smart thing to have some Mormon assassins pop out to Mountain Meadows and randomly slaughter a wagon train full of peaceful Christian travellers just for the hell of it?
Well, this makes perfect sense to the Christian bigot, because this is what Christian ministers of the day, and even of this day, thought, and still think of Mormonism:
The Monstrosity of Mormonism
Lyman Whitney Allan, DD, Newark NJ
The Assembly herald, Volume 10
By Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly
Mormonism is a monstrosity. It is a fungus growth upon civilization. It is a gross externalism, a horrible abnormalism. It never developed from roots deep in the trend of the Christian centuries. It started, in its degenerate individualism, forth and up from the pit. It began down in the blackness an isolated phenomenon. It bears the features of satanic parentage. It is Beelzebub’s offspring. By its fruit we know it, and its fruits have been blood and shame.
We make no apology for this characterization. History is history. A half century of time confirms what we have uttered. The apology for fifty years of infamous history rests with the Mormon hierarchy.
…
It is grossly foolish to lighten or to gloss over modern Mormonism by endeavoring to forget and eliminate its past. Mormonism and murder stand together. We appeal to the Mountain Meadow massacre and the bloodshed of “destroying angels.” Mormonism and sensualism are linked indissolubly…
Mormonism is the foe of the individual. What can the character of the individual Mormon be who is taught that sinful Adam is the only God with which he has to do, that it is good to slay the body to save the soul, and adultery is a means of grace? What can the character of the family be when the wife and the mother, whom God intended to be the purifying, uplifting and divine influence in the home, is to all intents and purposes a prostitute?…
Polygamy is only another name for moral leprosy…
…
…Mormonism has doubled its adherents in twelve years. Four hundred thousand people in this country claim allegiance to Mormonism, and they are people who are in some way so sinewy in spirit and body as to have transformed a desert and to have gotten the dominating political power in several States and to have constructed, as Professor Ely has remarked, “the most perfect piece of social mechanism with which I have ever in any way come in contact, excepting alone in the German army.”
…
I have had a Mormon elder in my home and been face to face with his sophistries. I have hurled the truth at Mormon elders from my pulpit, and the effect upon them was absolutely nothing. Neither excited nor touched, they went forward with the same hypocritic non-chalance to perpetuate and extend the aggressiveness of the Mormon machine.
We have made mistakes. We have admitted Utah as a State. The error is evident. It must be corrected. How? Cannot the Christian Church all over the land influence the emigration of Christian men and women to “Mormonized” territories? The preponderance of a Christian population will solve the Mormon problem. The Church must keep an eagle eye upon our Congress. it must not permit action favorable to Mormonism.
No, it’s not recent rhetoric from the Religious Right about Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy. But it might as well be. The Christian assumption of Constitutional and political right to rule is as clearly seen in the above criticism of the first elected Utah State Mormon Senator, Reed Smoot, in 1903, as it was in the 1838 Mob Manifesto:
We, the undersigned, citizens Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society, in consequence a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our County, styling themselves “Mormons;” and intending, as we do, two we are society, “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,” and believing as we do, that the arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one against the evils which are now inflicted upon us, and seem to be increasing, by the said religious sect, deem it expedient, and of the highest importance, to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose — a purpose which we deem it almost superfluous to say, is justified as well by the law of nature, as by the law of self-preservation.
If we fairly judge the history of Mormon patriotic expression, we clearly see a consistent deference to the
rights of all religious orders and beliefs, and a strong support for all political and religious orientations as guaranteed in the US Constitution. Christian utterances along political lines on the other hand, consistently assume that America is theirs by God’s ordination and Constitutional mandate. The emphasis above, is mine, but note that the Christian Secret Constitution, or Mob Manifesto, was authored by all the noted Christian clergy of the region, as well as many civil officers with whom they fellowshipped. It was not, as is claimed, in reaction to Rigdon’s “Salt Sermon,” or even the LDS Presidency’s 4th of July address. Rigdon’s Independence Day declaration could have been authored 
by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Ben Franklin. The Mob Manifesto in contrast, is a sinister, Christian Nation response to the LDS church’s publication of an article that implied an invitation to free negroes to emigrate to Missouri and join the Mormons.
Contrary to the delusions of Christian, moral-equivalency pretenders, the old Christian settlers of Missouri declared a war of extermination on the Latter-day Saints because they refused to let a bunch of nigger-
loving Mormons continue to build a thriving, free society that would crush their aspirations to build slave-powered mansions on cheap western farmland. Yes, that’s how they really put it. That’s how Christianity really justified the Missouri extermination order. That’s the unsanitized version.
But more than that, anti-Mormonists would like you to ignore period neutral evidence that suggests the Mormons had repeatedly appealed from the very start of their troubles in the state, to then Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin, through a team of lawyers and had tried again and again to resolve matters peacefully. The truth is, mob violence against Mormons in Missouri commenced in 1833 when it was realized and circulated through Christian journals that Mormons had reached majority in Jackson County and would soon command all of its affairs by simple domination of the ballot box:
- From the 31st of October until the 4th of November [1833], there was one continual scene of outrages of the most hideous kind. the mob collected in different parts of the county and attacked the Saints in most of their settlements, houses were unroofed, others were pulled down, leaving women and children, and even the sick and the dying exposed to the inclemency of the weather. Men were caught and whipped or clubbed until they were bruised from head to foot, and some were left upon the ground for dead. The most horrid threats and imprecations were uttered against us, and women and children were told, with cursings, that unless they left the country immediately they should be killed.
Never pacifistic, the Mormons vowed to fight back. And they did on November 4 when the Saints and the Missourians fought a ruinous skirmish on the eastern side of the Blue River. One Mormon and two Missourians died in the fighting and several received injuries.
Because of this battle Missouri militia Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pitcher, also a respected Independence business leader, went with troops on November 5, 1833, to the main Mormon settlements and forced the Mormons to give up their arms. Within a short time twelve hundred Mormons began leaving the county, now having no way to protect themselves.
–Alexander Doniphan, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate
The Mormons dragged their mounting civil and criminal cases against their persecutors through the courts as 
advised by their governor, while Dunklin pretended to be helpless to do more. This only incited the Old Christian Mobs to move into the adjoining counties where the Mormons had fled, to again loot, pillage, burn, and brutally destroy their homes and possessions, because it was thus clear the Mormons intended to stay and fight rather than run off as instructed by the Christian settlers.
By the time Mormonism attempted to vote at Gallatin, the start of the Mormon War of 1838, they had been through at least three counties and two governors attempting to settle their grievances in the courts and via the several police and security agents of the state. The newly elected governor Lilburn W Boggs was likewise appealed to for the protection of their persons, their property, and their civil rights. Naturally, today’s Christian apologists won’t tell you that his only reply was, that the state had wasted enough time and money defending the Mormons, and the warring parties would just have to fight it out amongst themselves.
Governor Ford of Illinois, when forced to make the hard choice of enforcing his Constitutionally demanded duty to protect the Mormons at the expense of his popular constituency, later essentially concurred with Boggs’ sentiment:
Men engaged in unpopular projects expect more protection from the laws than the laws are able to furnish in the face of popular excitement.
Anti-Mormonists keep insisting that Mormons got what they had coming in Missouri for burning down the polling town of Gallatin. They always forget to mention that Christian mobs had refused them their legal franchise to vote and physically assaulted them as they approached the polling place, which is what actually commenced the warfare. They also forget to mention that the thus offended Mormons burned Gallatin not only because they were being denied the right to vote there, but because the same parties attempting to drive them from the polls at Gallatin had been involved in burning most of them out of the counties next door some months previously.
Historian Richard L. Anderson concludes that Governor Boggs’s extermination order in Missouri was a fourth use, not the first, of a “remove-or-be-exterminated” policy employed by an aggressive,
northwestern Missouri, anti-Mormon political faction. By then, the Latter-day Saints had been forced from counties three times—from Jackson County in 1833, Clay County in 1836, and Carroll County just two weeks before. The governor merely made into state policy what had been county policy. He was a friend of faction leaders who, in practice, were an “expulsionist party.” This party gave Mormons an extermination order for Carroll County on 22 September, whereupon the Mormons petitioned the governor, reporting they were threatened with force and violence. They said their accusers had given them until 1 October to leave “and threatened, if not gone by that time, to exterminate them without regard to age or sex.” Governor Boggs’s order “only ratified the
program and slogans of the first-settlers’ party of upper Missouri.” The words “remove or be exterminated” were, Anderson observed, “expulsion party passwords.”7Anderson also affirmed that Governor Boggs’s order was a military order that was modified in the field but that technically lost its legal force when the military situation ended by 1 December. Since the Mormon exodus took place from December to April, “civilians without any authority enforced an expulsion policy that did not originate with the governor in the first place.”
http://mormonhistoricsitesfoundation.org/publications/studies_spring_01/MHS2.1Hartley.pdf
Perhaps some of the most impartial, if a bit sketchy, recordings of the anti-Mormon War of 1838 came from period journalists attempting to make sense of the events as they were happening:
The Mormon war has been terminated, by a surrender of the Mormon leaders to the troops under Gen. Atchinson. This happened on Sunday, Oct. 28th. On that day, about three thousand men, bein
g part of the army of 5000, ordered out under Gen. Clark, comprising Gen. Atchinson’s division made their appearance before the town of Far West, the county seat of Caldwell county, where the Mormons were entrenched. Upon their approach the Mormons had hoisted a white flag, which was shot down by Capt. Bogart, [Reverend Bogart] but was immediately replaced. Gen. Atchison then sent in a message, with a view to learn their wishes and intentions, when six of the leaders avowed their willingness to surrender, in the expectation that the Mormons should be unharmed. The surrender was accepted, and the individuals put under guard. Their names are Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, George Hinkle, Lyman Wight, Parley P. Pratt, and Mr. Knight. The Mormons assembled, at Far West, comprised 700 men under arms. Of this number, a small body of 150, retreated and pursued their way to the northern frontier.
The reports vary as to what happened after the surrender. In fact, our intelligence does not come down clearly to a period, later than the day of the capitulation.
[What happened after the surrender was rape, torture, murder and pillage—the details of which were not immediately forthcoming for obvious reasons. The details are however, now a part of the state records.]
On the day after, Gen. Atchison received the orders of the Governor, which has already been mentioned in this paper, as directing the expulsion or extermination of the Mormons. It is said that, shocked and disgusted with the severity of the command, he retired and went home. After that event, it is stated that several — some accounts say 40 of the Mormons — were put to death.
One version of the statement is, that the Mormons killed, at this time, were such as had not come into Far West. [To surrender.] We need, however, more certain and authentic information, than we now have, on this head.
Gen. Clark, with the remainder of the troops collected from the Counties below Caldwell, was, on the Friday after the surrender, encamped in Ray county, and had not then reached Far West.
It is stated that, about the time of the surrender, a Company of men — 200 in number — fell upon a body of the Mormons, in Splawn’s settlement, on Shoal Creek, about 20 miles from Far West. The Mormons, it is said, were 36 in number; and the story runs that all but four were put to death. Some of the names of the killed, as reported to us, are David Evans from Ohio, Jacob Fox, from Pennsylvania, Thomas M’Bride and his father, Mr. Daly, M. Merrill and his son-in-law, Mr. White, all from Ohio. [Haun’s Mill.]
The facts about Bogart’s fight are that two of his men were killed — one outright and one died of his wounds. At the same four Mormons fell — among them the captain of their band. [Battle of Crooked River.] Bogart’s company were stationed on the line of Ray Co., to intercept communication between Ray and Caldwell. They had captured 4 Mormons; and to rescue these the attack was made upon them by the Mormons. Bogart’s Company is said to have been 40 in number, and the Mormons 70.
As to the Mormon ravages in Daviess County — the plundering and burning of which so much has been said — we are informed that, before those hostile operations, the Mormons held a consultation, at which the propriety of the steps afterwards taken, was debated at large. Some of their number were averse to the plan, and nearly one third dissented from it. The reasons assigned for these measures, were alleged outrages by their enemies in Carroll and Daviess Counties.
According to the Mormon statement, their houses and buildings, near DeWitt, in Carroll County, had been destroyed by their enemies, and they themselves expelled from the County and afterwards pursued, on their retreat into Daviess. It was, therefore, as they allege, in retaliation for previous unprovoked outrages, that they executed their system of violence and terror in the County of Daviess. Evidently, they could not have adopted a more suicidal policy — allowing their own statements to be wholly true.
We have no time now — and it would take more space than we can spare for it — even with a knowledge of all the facts, to enter into a history of the origin and progress of this difficulty. But there is a statement in this connection, which we have heard but recently, and which we sincerely hope is not true. That statement is as follows:
About the 9th or 10th of last month, when about 80 Mormon families had been expelled from Carroll county, and driven into Daviess, a message was sent by them to the State executive, praying for his interposition in their behalf. The reply to that message was, that already the State had been put to a great deal of expense on account of these difficulties, and that he could see no cause to interpose, thus leaving the parties to fight it out!
[The governor’s latter response to the Mormon cry for help and justice is also now a part of the state record.]
–Daily Missouri Republican – November 9, 1838
[Not by the way, by any means a pro-Mormon newspaper.]
http://www.truthandgrace.com/1838warover.htm
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/findingaids/miscMormonRecords.asp?rec=eo
The above testimony of course, tends to negate the Christian apologist’s contention that the Missouri 
extermination order was justified because the Mormons attacked the state militia. OK, well, the Mormons did attack the militia. Anti-Mormons billed it as the “Battle of Crooked River,” and pretended the Mormons almost wiped out the entire militia contingent. As we see above however, only one of the state’s company was killed and another died of wounds later. And of course the “state militia” involved was a rogue body of Christian volunteers led by the infamous Captain Samuel Bogart, a Methodist minister and sworn enemy of Mormonism. And of course, Bogart and his men had been systematically raiding Mormon settlements, was the Vicar of Christ who slaughtered and hacked up old men and children at Haun’s Mill, killed perhaps a hundred or more Mormons there and elsewhere, and was at the time holding four Mormons hostage—the liberation of which was the sole intention of the so-called attack upon said “militia” at Crooked River.
Having been forcibly expelled from Jackson County in 1833, the Mormons had migrated north to a county specially created for them by the legislature, Caldwell. However, the influx of new Mormon converts into Missouri caused them to start settling in adjacent counties (including Daviess), which many older settlers felt they had no right to do.[4] Fears arose that the Mormons would take control of all political offices in nearby counties, and this combined with prejudice and fears about the Mormons’ economic practices, attitudes toward Native Americans and slaves, and other factors to create an explosive situation by the fall of 1838.[5]
Bogart first took an active role in anti-Mormon activities during a disturbance in Carroll County, where Mormons had established a settlement called De Witt, in violation of an alleged agreement with non-Mormons not to settle in that county. No written agreement to this effect was ever produced, but this did not stop renegade Missouri militiamen from laying siege to the Mormon settlement from October 1 to October 10, 1838. When General Hiram Parks arrived with militia troops—Bogart and his company among them—to restore order, Bogart and his unit immediately sided with the anti-Mormon mob, refusing to obey General Parks’ orders to such a point that Parks had to order them back to Ray County to prevent them from joining the vigilantes.[6] Parks unsuccessfully endeavored to have Bogart expelled from the State Guard for his insubordination.[7]
Following a fight between Mormons and non-Mormons during a county election in Gallatin, county seat of Daviess County, Bogart impetuously called out his militia unit, ostensibly to prevent an imminent invasion of Ray County by the Latter Day Saints. No such invasion was actually
contemplated, but Bogart decided to act aggressively against the Mormons, anyway.[8] He marched his company to the Caldwell County line, picking up volunteers along the way, then obtained permission from his new superior, General David Atchison, to “range the line” between the two counties to prevent any invasion of Ray County.[9] However, Bogart and his men decided that the defensive posture ordered by Atchison was not to their liking, and so they divided into smaller units and proceeded to disarm Mormons living first in northern Ray County, then in southern Caldwell, as well. Though clearly exceeding his original mandate, Bogart continued to harass and threaten local Mormon settlers and even threatened to give Far West—county seat of Caldwell County, and the main Mormon settlement in Missouri—”thunder and lightning” if the
Mormons did not leave the area forthwith.[1
…
Following the conclusion of the Mormon War, Bogart was involved in an altercation with fellow-citizen Alexander Beattie during a militia election, during which Bogart shot and killed Beattie, then fled to Texas with a thousand-dollar bounty on his head.[19] He settled in Washington County, where he joined the Texas Rangers and became a company commander in that organization.[20] While in the Rangers, Bogart participated in the abortive Mier Expedition in 1842–43 into Mexico, which resulted in the infamous “black bean” incident, where seventeen Texans were executed after drawing black beans in a random death lottery instituted by orders of Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Bogart survived his experiences in Mexico, and upon his return to Texas in 1844, settled down in Collin County. Here he would serve four two-year terms in the state legislature, including one as a senator.[21]
Bogart was never brought to justice for his murder of Beattie, nor for any of the depredations he had committed against the Mormons in Missouri.
Bogart resigned from the Texas legislature in 1861 on account of ill health, after signing the Texas ordinance of secession. He died on 11 March 1861, and is buried in Collin County in an unmarked grave.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bogart
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=59001968
The Most Reverend Major Bogart—a promotion given in Texas–is described by Christian apologists to this day as one of the “heroes” of the Missouri Mormon “rebellion.” And unless you want to count the Mountain Meadows Massacre, none of the “heroes” of any of the Mormon Wars were ever brought to justice.
Mormon Wars Part 1: The Fighting Parson
John Chivington was the swashbuckling Methodist minister who’s militant Christianizing and Abolitionist sermonizing got him driven out of the Kansas/Missouri conflicts of the mid 1800’s. “Bleeding Kansas,” it was called. His ecclesiastical overseers moved him to Nebraska territory for his own safety. When the Civil War broke out, in November of 1862 he turned down a US Army chaplain’s rank and took an officer’s commission. A “fighting” commission, rather than a “praying” commission, as he phrased it. He adopted the high, central Rockies and helped rush Colorado into statehood by first driving whole contingents of Rebel forces out of the region, and upon this epic foundation of fame and glory, Chivington next promoted himself into position as the primary agent of exterminating as much of the Cheyenne Nation as he could manage, men, women, and children. His crowning achievement was effected in November of 1864 and is today known shamefully as the “Massacre of Sand Creek.”
The Cheyenne, like many Native Americans, called themselves the “Human Beings.” Chivington didn’t think so.
Christian America is not short of God-blessed atrocities in the name of progress and Christian civilization. This is so obvious in retrospect, one would think the Christian apologist wouldn’t even bring up the Mormon question for fear of not only getting plastered with a deluge of historically undeniable persecutions they heaped upon the Mormons, but worse yet, of opening that black, fuming kettle of Born-Again butchery they inflicted upon the Native Americans in the same Christian, Holy Expansionist zeitgeist. Still, ever since the frontier heydays of Calvin’s little American holocaust, Christian historical revisionists have vainly sought to pull at least a single Mormon-on-Christian atrocity out of their magic, apologetic hats to “prove” the Mormons were up to something all along, and thus justify all their Christian paranoia and anti-Mormon violence.
The turd-polishing Christian-Nation shine-up specialists have always resorted to excusing their treatment of the Indians in America’s western expansion by countering with examples of Native American actions of equivalent revulsion. It’s the, they’re savages anyway–so tough-titty if they got treated like savages, defense. These Native incidents of course, were usually reciprocal, and very often in-kind responses to Christian initial aggression. But chronology is irrelevant when God is on your side and all the witnesses are either dead, can’t speak your language, can’t make their case in the public media, and have been banished to the an obscure wilderness where nobody will hear their complaints anyway.
And the truth is, particularly in the same Bible-Belt regions that still hate and abuse Mormons, the good Christians don’t treat Native Americans much better than they did when those territories and states were first opened. Tribes and reservations that ended up with casinos, fishing rights, oil, or otherwise fought themselves into industry that was self-sustaining or even massively profitable, are the objects of white Christian derision. America in large number, cries out in a country-wide chorus of pissing and moaning, as today’s good Christian citizens try to blow these tribes and their enterprises off at the knees, appropriate the client base of their gambling trade, pilfer their fish and game, steal their natural resources, cripple, and pick them to death until the good white Christians connive even that little bit of sovereignty away from them.
History is always written, and then revised, by the victors. In the case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the several Mormon Wars, the ultimate victors would be what even the devout Christian mainstream now calls the "Religious Right." These modern pretenders to Christian virtue use the aberrant and perplexing Mormon action at Mountain Meadows as undisputable proof of Mormonism’s “true” Satanic intent. This intent they claim, is simply to kill all the Christians and take all of their stuff.
The thing is, Christians believe everyone is trying to kill them off and take all their stuff. Christians believe all the stuff is theirs by Divine Right in the first place.
The 1857 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, as I will eventually elucidate in my own winding and convoluted fashion, is indeed the one act of uncalled-for and inexplicably motivated anti-Christian violence with which the Mormons have encumbered their otherwise admirable history of restraint. While it is undeniably a Mormon action against Christians, the exact reason or reasons for the Mormon-led eradication of some 120 Christian pioneers from Arkansas, and their rough, rednecked Missouri trail crew, as they passed through the remote, southern Utah Mormon settlements, it is far from clear. Was this action taken because they were Christians, or was it because they were a trainload of mouthy, pompous a-holes who had it coming? Did the Mormons simply side with their pissed-off friends, the local Native Americans, who had already taken the latter opinion? A harsh couple of questions those, and crudely put, yet, Christian America’s only widely embraced defense of generations of Mormon persecution honestly comes to the contention that Mormons are all mouthy, pompous a-holes and they had it coming. So in the case of Mountain Meadows, it is fair to ask, was this ultimately a case of “turn-about is fair play?”
What is clear however, is that neither Brigham Young as church president, nor any of the local Mormon authorities involved in the slaughter at Mountain Meadows, gleefully ran out and surrounded a Christian wagon train and shot them down as part of any program at any level in the LDS church to kill off all the Christians and take all their stuff. Mormons did not want their lives, their goods, their national sovereignty, they did not seek to destroy their Christian religion or any of the other related fables that anti-Mormonists have invented and fantasized into the narrative over the many generations that Christians have engaged in the anti-Mormonist hobby. The very clear and open position of Brigham Young and his followers was that they just wanted everyone else to piss off and leave them alone in their own state, to be loyal American citizens. That’s all. And still, for the anti-Mormonist’s paranoid abuse of Mormons through the years to be justifiable, Mormonism simply has to have a sinister underbelly. To this end, logic and facts aside, Mountain Meadows will forever be the only bit of unfabricated, empirical evidence “proving” the anti-Mormonist’s multi-generational claims of Mormon treachery, disloyalty, and lawlessness.
While the tragedy of Mountain Meadows cannot be denied, this complicated, bizarre, multi-party sequence of events, is proposed by the anti-Mormonists, to justify the entire 37 years of Christian oppression, rape, murder, torture and mayhem heaped upon the Mormons previous to this alleged strike back at their Christian tormentors. Mormons were indeed one of the several parties in conflict at Mountain Meadows. They clearly came out on top of the contest. Their tactics were underhanded and their motivation is suspect. But as in most issues that Christian antagonists raise against Mormonism, it’s not as clear as all that.
One of the most telling evidences of the less-than treasonous nature of the LDS church and its leadership in
the Mountain Meadows Massacre, is the fact that Brigham Young was investigated and pardoned of all involvement less than a year afterward, while a new Christian governor had just been installed and arrived with an army intent upon destroying Mormonism. The new governor failed to see the panic and called the extermination project off. Nobody in Utah on-site or in Washington ever took any great interest in making a church-breaking case out of Mountain Meadows. It was investigated twice, two trials were held because the first ended in a hung jury. Ultimately, one local Mormon leader was determined to be the ringleader, he faced a firing squad, and that was that
. Certainly, it remains a very personal tragedy for the descendants of the massacre. Advocates of the injured parties will perpetually claim that Brigham Young personally ordered the bushwhacking of an innocent wagon train of Christian pioneers. His motivation they ostensibly claim, is just that he’s an evil bastard. They will insist that John D Lee, the local Mormon bishop who was punished for the crime was a only a patsy and a scapegoat. But, with all due respect to those career anti-Mormonists who are still milking it today, the truly weird events at Mountain Meadows really did not, and does not say much about either the LDS church, its doctrines, or its patriotism.
Understanding the psychology of Mountain Meadows, attempting to analyze the motivations of Mormonism’s bad players in the debacle, will have to wait however. One has to fully grasp the early, frontier, American “Christian” phenomenon a little better first. To discover what motivated Mormonism’s counter-moves in the Christian war against them, you have to first peel back the well-crafted veneer overlaid upon the several histories anti-Mormonists have long promulgated, until you can first see how the Christian manufacturers of today’s American cultural identity have consistently varnished the facts to cover their own legacy of ugliness in any given event or conflict with them, be that with Mormonism, Native Americans, or any other party or sub-faction of their own body. You have to honestly, really get to know the allegedly peaceful, innocent, “God-fearing, patriotic Americans,” that period Mormons were dealing with in these highly sanitized Christian re-tellings of their dealings with “savages,” “traitors,” and “heretics” in the American West:
You need to think John Chivington, Butcher of Sand Creek, not Billy Graham or Mother Teresa.
Today we think of raving, fiery, fundamentalists as a crazy minority, but they were the mainstream Christians
of the early Mormon periods. They brought their fanaticism to Joseph Smith in Upstate New York as a child. He rejected and offended them there, and they have ever since followed his movement all the way across the country, out to Utah Territory and beyond, dogging and harassing his work and his people. When early Mormonism sent missionaries to the Pacific Islands, its Christian tormentors stalked them from Island to island in canoes, warning off the natives, putting them in fear of hell and damnation–never mind if as a result it put the lives of Mormon missionaries at risk.
The same pious, oppressively sour Christian fundamentalists who first made Holy War on Mormonism, crammed the Temperance Movement down America’s throat, shoved it all the way into Lady Liberty’s gullet, and for 13 hellish years America choked for a drink while cranky crones from the Anti-Saloon League and other Temperance NAZI’s and dry boosters, ran enough of America’s political structure to maintain a boot at the nation’s throat to spare it from the refreshment of fermented fruits and grains.
The difference between prohibition and Mormonism, is that nearly everybody in the country wanted a drink, even if their wives or ministers, political or social circles compelled them to support condemning alcohol. Yes, America admitted, liquor has its down side, but still, the nation wondered in the end, why penalize the 90% of the population who were perfectly respectable moderate 
drinkers because the other 10% had some, usually slight, level of difficulty dealing with alcohol?
Most of early Mormon-era America suspected Mormonism had a theoretical down-side even if it didn’t personally affect them. But they had no motivation to do anything about it. Unlike alcohol however, Americans in general had no inherent, burning desire to be a Mormon. Mormonism had few bold advocates outside of its own. And when outside advocates became Mormons, they were then just numbered as Mormons and their broader social and political influence usually vanished in a puff of bigotry. The average American had no dog in the fight and was thus oblivious to the issue or went along to get along with prevailing anti-Mormon activists.
In the fight for alcohol, eventually the wet voters threw off their Temperance persecutors and the dry political factions came to be seen as a load of bitter, dower old bats who primarily resented their husbands having a local tavern in which to escape from them. The scales lifted from America’s eyes and the Temperance Movement was clearly seen to be nothing more than the overly-pious, Church-Police—State fantasy of a load of withered-up sourpuss preachers and unhappy, frumpy, bitter old crones who just had a problem with people enjoying life in general.
Temperance efforts existed in antiquity, but the movement really came into its own as a reaction to
the pervasive use of distilled beverages in modern times. The earliest organizations in Europe came into being in Ireland in the 1820s, then swept to Scotland and Britain. Norway and Sweden saw movements rise in the 1830s. In the United States, a pledge of abstinence had been promulgated by various preachers, notably John Bartholomew Gough, at the beginning of the 1800s. Temperance associations were established in New York (1808) and Massachusetts (1813). The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (1826) was interdenominational. Thanks largely to the lead from the pulpit, some 6,000 local temperance groups in many states were up and running by the 1830s.
The movement existed in a matrix of unrest and intellectual ferment in which such other social ills as slavery, neglect and ill-treatment of marginalized people, [Ed.note: Like Jews, Catholics, Indians and Mormons] were addressed by liberals and conservatives alike. Sometimes called the First Reform Era, running through the 1830s and ’40s, it was a period of inclusive humanitarian reform.
The first statewide success for the temperance movement was in Maine, which passed a law on June 2, 1851, which served as model for other states. Proponents suggested that it was motivated by a justified concern for the public welfare, but not all agreed. An anonymous letter which appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (May 1852) suggested that:
http://www.wpl.lib.oh.us/AntiSaloon/
http://prohibition.osu.edu/asl/
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1054.html
The American Christians who gave us the Temperance Movement and Prohibition, were the same American
Christians who also drove the anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic, anti-Indian, and every other anti-Movement. Mormonism arose in the same regions, religions, nations, sects and cultures as the Temperance Movement, and blossomed in the center of all these revivalists exercises. As Mormonism fled west, the revivalist fanatics expanded west to meet them again and again. They followed Mormonism like a pack of bickering dogs, snapping for scraps of Mormon prosperity, jealous of the Mormon progress in lands, congregations, and societies, from the Northeast to the Intermountain West.
To their delight, in the vast isolation of the American West, Mormonism finally exposed a few doctrinal ticks that its Christian detractors began to find America had a genuine, universal cultural disagreement with. If America’s forces of matronly prudishness and their exclusive ministers of piety and patriotism believed they could send you to prison for drinking a beer, these self-righteous Christian crusaders surely believed they could send you to prison for taking another wife or two. This is particularly true as I say, since the revivalist movement was driven in good measure by embittered old wives who’s husbands habitually found refuge from their dour personas in the nearest tavern.
The old Christian battle axes didn’t want hubby getting ideas—or exploring alternatives. They were on a unilateral mission to cleanse, purify, and reform American society. Then, they thought, the old man would find no quarter. Left with no place to hide, he would penitently return home to the domestic domination of his wife, and spend all his time helping around the house, and teaching his children to be good Christians.
In the case of Prohibition of course, "Church Lady," instead of stifling the carnal nature of America’s Christian manhood, gave America organized crime and the bootlegging, moonshining, and smuggling industries that went on to provide the blueprint for today’s illicit drug industry and international drug cartels. Church Lady inadvertently gave her old man the speak-easy, where he could not only have a drink with the lads, but frolic with a rising generation of hot, sexy young “flappers” and listen to “jungle music” from the latest bunch of negroes to make it big on the jazz circuit that these dens of alcohol and sex first gave a national stage to. Where the old hu
bby once relished only a quiet beer after work with his pals for a few hours before going home to face the wife, now he caroused all night with a packed house of drunken young men and women who had discovered sex, booze, reefer, morphine, ether, 
cocaine and jazz. Mr. Church Lady reveled with sinners and became addicted to an exhilarating sense of illegality. And if the old guy couldn’t get the flappers drunk enough to bed them, all he had to do is nod to the barkeep and an obliging escort would appear in moments for a small fee.
That made America a better place alright. Thanks Church Lady.
The general American male population may have resented the Puritanical anti-Mormon forces even more than the Mormons themselves, but figured that as long as the fun-killing Calvinists, the prudish Presbyterians, the wailing Wesleyans, and the battling Baptists with their ever-beckoning Arminian dunk tanks were harassing Mormons, they were leaving the good Christian menfolk alone to find safe haven in a backsliding man-cave in the urban wild wild west, with a good stiff drink, a fat cigar, and a hooker or mistress on each arm.
Even today, you’ll find the same spirit of obnoxious Christian “Temperance League” style aggression alive in the infamous Westboro Baptist congregation, who’ve made it their mission to go about the country spitting on the graves of war heroes, crashing funerals, screaming at their mothers, wives, fathers, brothers, families and survivors, telling 
them that God hates their dead loved one because military policy allows homosexuals to serve in the armed forces. It defies any logic to connect the Westboro bigots’ damnation of fallen war heroes–who may well be straight and Christian–to their theoretical proximity to some person in their ranks that might have been homosexual, even if you hate homosexuals. Protesting homosexuals, at their funerals in general, or picketing funerals of openly homosexual military heroes would make some sense along those lines. But that’s the way the Christian fanatical mind works.
It doesn’t.
Back at the height of anti-Mormonism of course, the Westboro Baptists would have been well armed, would have had all the local politicians and civil authorities in their camp, and come at their foes in the middle of the night with shotguns, pistols, rifles, kerosene and torches.
Alarmingly, the “Progressive,” the “Gay” or “Liberal,” allegedly educated and civilized public, ranks these Satanically inspired Westboro Baptists right alongside Mormons—the same Mormons the forefathers of the Westboro Baptists were raping and hacking up and burning and shooting into attempted extinction. Why? B
ecause apparently elements of the LDS church in California recently rallied a political movement to put down a proposition that would re-define the term “Marriage,” to mean the social, domestic, and sexual union of essentially any two adults of either gender or any combination or permutation thereof. The irony of it all, is that up until fifty or so years ago, the religious comrades of the Westboro Baptist church were hanging “niggers and queers and Mormons” as they would term them, openly, in white sheets and pointy hats–while proudly voting Democrat.
Back in the day, it was the Mormons pleading the case against the KKK. The KKK was the enforcement arm of the Christian Democrat. It was the Mormons telling the government to get its nose out of their bedrooms. It was the Mormons who first took to the Supreme Court the proposition that civil government had no right to regulate and limit the institution of Holy Matrimony strictly along orthodox, western Christian social convention. And it was the Christian Democrats and their KKK-filled congregations and voter constituencies that packed the Supreme Court with judges who decreed that marriage is an entirely civil institution and can therefore be defined any way the civil authorities care to define it.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-jacobs/mormon-church-on-prop-8-w_b_140804.html
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/reynoldsvus.html
http://www.enotes.com/supreme-court-drama/reynolds-v-united-states
Little has changed with the historically Christian enemies of Mormonism since the KKK days. There’s still a KKK for one thing. They’re still down south in fair numbers and occasionally they still try to shoot, burn or beat Mormons out of the Bible Belt. When you have an entire religion, a comprehensive culture, like orthodox Christianity, that keeps telling its population from infancy that this or that identifiable minority is directly serving Satan, when you tell your children that some easily marked boogieman is trying to rob them of their rightful inheritance of land and power in America, eventually somebody is going to take a pop at the nearest servant of Satan or try to kill the boogieman.
You can’t blame the generations of America’s Bible-thumping offspring raised to hate non-Christians, or gays
or blacks or foreigners, or in this case, Mormons, because it makes perfect sense to them to stick it to the Mormons or their other cultural demons, before, as they imagine, the Mormons or any other of their feared hellish hordes, stick it to them. They spend their entire lives in a self-inflated bubble of paranoia, waiting, waiting, and still waiting for this or that conniving foe to suddenly rear its seemingly docile head and strike.
For some reason however, even those who have received a higher education, those with elevated degrees in “thinkology,” are unable to make any distinction between Mormonism, the KKK, and fundamentalist wackos like the Westboro Baptists. And so, even those who pretend to be classical Liberals, dedicated to honest journalism, to accurate, as opposed to reconstructed history, usually go into Mormon news, Mormon history, or Mormon theology, determined to make the facts conform to their pre-determined image of Mormonism as a generic, book-burning, small-minded, delusional cult of Christian Fundamentalist zealots. The fundamentals of Mormonism however, come down to accountability to man, civil law, and God. Mormonism is all about the Constitution being a Divine document, and America being ordained by God as a place of free worship and civil liberty.
The fundamentals of historic Christianity are: I’m saved no matter what I do. Everyone else is a child of Satan. I am the mortal arm of God’s will. I am his protector and avenger.
Liberals have their suspicion of danger exactly backward, and we see this also in their failure to recognize the
danger of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. In fact, the Left seems quite eager to embrace the Palestinian, the Arab, the Muslim guerrilla causes. The US for example, backed the Afghan “Freedom Fighters” in their struggle to throw off Soviet Oppression of their religion, but then the Mujahedeen won their freedom and morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Right realizes, too late, that they got fooled. Liberals must know that if given the chance, most of their pet Islamic poster-children at the drop of a hat would love to impose Sharia Law and start beheading Liberals–starting with the most vocal opponents to the allegedly repressive LDS church, the
Gay Rights crowd. Godless Liberals, Gay Liberals, Christian Liberals, it wouldn’t matter: they’re all going to be dead under Sharia law. Then the Muslim fanatics would move on to the Conservative Christians as well. We’re all infidels to the Islamic Jihadists and subject to systematic persecution, prosecution, and imposed conversion or extinction.
The Left excuses the inherent civil rights and misogynist values of historic Arab and other Islamic cultures, it even encourages and finances rebellion across the continents to replace pluralistic secular governments in the middle east with Islamic theocracies. I can’t explain how they think this works to their benefit, but Liberals then accuse Mormonism of embracing a similar culture as if it’s a very bad thing
The “enlightened” Left is far more inclined to just leave Muslim society to treat its people according to barbaric local custom, than tolerate Mormonism, because in Mormonism’s case, espousing traditional family values and conventional sexual morality, is billed as the most wicked form of oppression and bigotry. Mormons not wanting to re-define the English word “Marriage” and instead use some other label like “Domestic Union” or “Domestic Partnership,” for instance, in the mind of the lunatic Left, is the moral equivalent of dragging “fags” through the public square, chained behind a well-armed and ruggedly manned Toyota pickup to make an example of them for the rest of the village.
See, it’s not Mormonism that kills homosexuals. Sharia Law does that. The Left’s favorite Egyptian and Palestinian heroes do that. And, who else does that? Rednecks. Christian rednecks, the traditional enemies of Mormonism. How many gay victims have Mormon missionaries dragged through the streets to their deaths so far?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/hatecrimes/stories/brothers072199.htm
None. Zero.
Christian rednecks however, have done that and worse to Mormon missionaries. Rednecks hate Mormons because their minister says they’re devilish heretics. They worship a phony Jesus, not the real Jesus. Leftists and neo-Liberals hate Mormons because they don’t embrace the gay lifestyle and at one time banned negroes from holding priesthood office, or at one time "enslaved" multiple wives and currently still "enslave" women in underling roles. Mormons are neither fish nor fowl in this contemporary American Left-Right scenario. They are neither like their Islamic, Jewish, or Christian religious fellows, all of whom justify themselves via the same sort of “join or die, and you’re all going to hell,” Biblical theology. You cannot second-guess Mormonism from a Liberal/Conservative, Christian, or even Jewish or Islamic mindset. It’s a whole other thing. It’s a Joseph Smith thing. It is a religion and culture frozen in the enlightened, Jeffersonian, “Great Architect of the Universe” era. And even in the context of their original social, religious, and political environment, as enlightened, classical Liberals, there too they were the odd-man-out of nearly every national issue. They have been, still are, and probably always will be, the common enemy of all.
http://publicpolicyalliance.org/?p=288
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran
http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/06/dragging.death.02/index.htmlhttp://www.cnn.com/US/9807/06/dragging.death.02/index.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=683834n
http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/42/42sciabarra.php
http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/09/gay_bashing_on_broadway_young_man_attack
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story
But it’s Mormons the American Left now singles out for persecution. Not Islamo-fascists. Not fag-baiting Baptists
who disrupt military funerals for no logical reason. No, oddly enough, it’s redneck bikers mostly without a gay-activist bone in their bodies coming out to those disruptions to put themselves between the foaming Baptists and the fallen heroes—not the Gay Pride crowd or the Leftist Sons of Berkeley. No, all the gay-loving, hippy-wannabees are out picketing Mormon temples instead. They seem little interested in putting down openly antagonistic mobs of actual homophobes carrying “God hates Gays” banners. Maybe this is because the Lefties all know the Mormons won’t drag them out of bed, tie them to a fence, light their genitals on fire, and beat them to death. Maybe it’s because they suspect there’s a good chance that rednecks of the Westboro Baptist church and its friends will.
The danger America faces is not in having a so-professed Mormon prophet because he might go loony and make Mormons do weird things. Anyone who’s seriously studied the actual content of Mormon canon and doctrinal literature would laugh at this notion. Mormonism has a nearly two-hundred year long history of growing more and more placid, innocuous and uneventful. The real danger to American society is having a 
ruling population of Christians who believe everyone else is going to hell and non-Christians have no right to any place in a Christian America. They don’t need a prophet. They don’t need governing councils or quorums or a consensus vote on anything. Any crazy Christian bumpkin can grab a Bible, call himself “saved” and “called” to the ministry, make up his own rules, gather a sympathetically warped congregation, and he’s instantly in the business of dominating American life and culture according to whatever demented world view comes into his head. All he has to do is claim it stems from some delusional read of the Bible. That’s Al Qaeda. It’s a snake with thousands of heads that just keep growing back no matter how many you lop off trying to defend yourself from it.
You fire up a movement. You get everyone jazzed. Then you point the mob at a target and let them figure out how to accomplish the goal of dominating competitors. You can call it the Tea Party, or Occupy Wall Street, or anything you want. But once set in motion, a very few key, usually unseen players can manipulate the monster to attack their chosen targets and direct it anywhere they want. Your local minister gives a fiery sermon against homosexuals, and a few weeks later some punks tie a gay guy to a fence and light him on fire. It’s connected, but then it’s not connected, and you can’t really stop it once it starts. There is nobody in charge, or at least, no single person or organization in charge of all of it all at once.
Joseph Smith called that a “Mobocracy.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Identity
The hereditary enemies of Mormonism are the self-proclaimed, good Christian forces of Biblical American purity that gave us the Civil War, and before that, the Missouri Bushwhackers and the Kansas Jayhawks who murdered and raided, burned and pillaged each other like rabid animals, after they’d “purified” themselves of the Mormon “threat.” The good, solid Christian Americans who posed Mormonism as a danger to Missouri and Illinois, and indeed the sovereignty of the United States of America, were almost to the man, a few years later seceding from the Union and leading the Christian South in outright rebellion and wholesale war against the Constitution. These are the "Christians" Mormons turned against at Mountain Meadows.
Early anti-Mormonism, like Prohibition, was a fanatical, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant phenomenon. Like the Temperance Movement, anti-Mormonism started in the furious religious revivalism of the early 19th century, and took nearly a hundred years to achieve it’s ultimate goal, in the one case, the outlawing of alcohol, in the other case, the extermination, or at least political and social castration of Mormonism.
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
One would think that at least the political Left and the legitimately “enlightened” would immediately recognize a common enemy in those who claim the Constitution was intended to found and enforce a national, neo-Calvinist, militant, Christian fundamentalist theocracy. But the historical tar brush has been laid on so black and so sticky, and the coating of dark goo has been so long painted upon Mormonism, that even the most intellectually and spiritually astute today actually see some sort of moral equivalency in the anti-Mormon claim that Mormonism might be up to something underhanded, that Mormonism is perverted Christianity, Satan’s fake church, and therefore whatever America’s Christian Patriots have inflicted upon the LDS church and its people over the years, is only due to Mormon provocation.
Mormonism existing is a provocation.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/individuals/john-eidsmoe
http://www.allaboutmormons.com/brief_critique_anti-mormon_propaganda.php
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/why-anti-mormon-rhetoric-acceptable-us
Then too, I suppose it is easy to believe that early anti-Mormon persecution was over-rated if you’re also a Holocaust denier. If you believe Hitler only killed a few hundred-thousand Jews and not 7 million, so that’s no big deal. Or if you believe Israel blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11 with remote-controlled aircraft and there never were any real hijackers or passengers aboard. People believe that stuff. A lot of them. However, a more 
likely truth, one supported by voluminous, well-documented confession, admission, and boasting of the anti-Mormon forces themselves, is that Mormonism’s Christian neighbors wanted to enslave black people, administer the law, courts, and all civil government directly from their interpretation of the Bible, effectively give their chosen preachers and ministers of God a civil theocracy, and repress anyone who didn’t support them. Fair is fair. Critics of Mormonism are correct. Mormons could not get along with those sorts of neighbors. Neither could you. Neither could the vast majority of Americans today.
Ask the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and the other “civilized,” or rather, “Christianized” eastern Native American tribes about not being able to get along with their neighbors. They were the first to get to know the same “God-fearing” Christian hillbillies and good American patriots the Mormons seemed to have trouble getting along with a generation later. Even after converting to Christ, attending worship regularly, building houses, running farms, wearing “civilized” clothes their white Christian conquerors insisted they
wear, after surrendering their children to white schools, after learning the white man’s language and customs and manners, the good white Christian folk of Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, the entire eastern seaboard, one day just decided they didn’t like “Injins” living amongst them and drove these Born-Again Native Christians, their brothers in Christ, out of their ancestral homelands at gunpoint, into the dead of winter with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to die in the unopened western wilderness.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
http://www.studyworld.com/indian_removal_act_of_1830.htm
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/7402
http://www.coppercountry.com/article_97.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_termination_policy
The “Indian Removal Act of 1830” was the brainchild of “Hickory” Andrew Jackson, an Irish-American Presbyterian and patron saint of the Tennessee hillbillies for whom he’d specifically cleared out the eastern Indian tribes. Presbyterians were hard-core Calvinists, theological arch-enemies of Mormonism, 
and Jackson’s “Scots-Irish” stock became the ethnic root of the term “redneck.” Jackson was the instigator of a near-genocidal American national policy of exterminating or otherwise neutralizing the heathen savages of any non-white, non-Christian race, creed or color. President Andrew Jackson and Congressional fellows, wanted to progressively secure their new land from coast-to-coast for the Manifest Destiny of good, white, Christian patriots.
The westward-moving white Christian settlers often shot Indians on sight, friend or foe. They didn’t stop to ask, as it wasn’t considered relevant. Christian “civilization” continually headed farther west to claim new Indian land, and if the Indians retaliated, the settlers cried to the army, and the US army, led by Christian patriots like John Chivington, rode into Native American villages in places like Sand Creek Colorado, and slaughtered men, women and children indiscriminately to teach Native America the New Christian Order of things.
John Chivington was the American Christian renaissance man of his day. He became a serious influence on regional Illinois religion and politics almost immediately after his 1844 ordination. He started his adventures in religion and war just as his fellow Illinois Christians, with some help from like-minded Missouri crusaders, were murdering Joseph Smith. Chivington served his first clerical duties in post-Joseph Smith era Illinois as the last of the Mormons were being beaten down, scraped up, and mopped out of the state. Caught up in the excitement of westward Christian expansion, Chivington ended up in a very volatile Kansas Territory. An avid Abolitionist, he soon found himself on the losing side of the question and he got driven out into Nebraska Territory by Missouri bushwhackers and pro-slavery Kansas thugs much the same way Joseph Smith had been run out of the same area by the same people for the same reason–once again, Andy Jackson’s sainted Tennessee hillbillies and their visions of slaves, plantations, wealth, and power.
When the Civil War broke out, Colorado’s territorial governor, William Gilpin, offered Chivington a commission as a chaplain, but he declined the "praying" commission and asked for a "fighting" position instead. In 1862, Chivington, by that point a Major in the first Colorado Volunteer Regiment, played a critical role in defeating confederate forces at Glorietta Passin eastern New Mexico, where his troops rapelled down the canyon walls in a surprise attack on the enemy’s supply train. He was widely hailed as a military hero.
Back in Denver after the defeat of the Confederacy’s Western forces, Chivington seemed destined for even greater prominence. He was a leading advocate of quick statehood for Colorado, and the likely Republican candidate for the state’s first Congressional seat. In the midst of his blossoming political prospects, tensions between Colorado’s burgeoning white population and the Cheyenne Indians
reached a feverish pitch. The Denver newspaper printed a front-page editorial advocating the "extermination of the red devils" and urging its readers to "take a few months off and dedicate that time to wiping out the Indians."
Chivington took advantage of this dangerous public mood by blasting the territorial governor and others who counseled peace and treaty-making with the Cheyenne. In August of 1864, he declared that "the Cheyennes will have to be roundly whipped — or completely wiped out — before they will be quiet. I say that if any of them are caught in your vicinity, the only thing to do is kill them." A month later, while addressing a gathering of church deacons, he dismissed the possibility of making a treaty with the
Cheyenne: "It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty. I am fully satisfied, gentlemen, that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado."
Several months later, Chivington made good on his genocidal promise. During the early morning hours of November 29, 1864, he led a regiment of Colorado Volunteers to the Cheyenne’s Sand Creek reservation, where a band led by Black Kettle, a well-known "peace" chief, was encamped. Federal army officers had promised Black Kettle safety if he would return to the reservation, and he was in fact flying the American flag and a white flag of truce over his lodge, but Chivington ordered an attack on the unsuspecting village nonetheless. After hours of fighting, the Colorado volunteers had lost only 9 men in the process of murdering between 200 and 400 Cheyenne, most of them women and children. After the slaughter, they scalped and sexually mutilated many of the bodies, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.
Like the anti-Mormon engagements in Missouri and Illinois, in which ordained mi
nisters openly led militia charges intent upon extermination, the Sand Creek Massacre was proudly rallied together by a well-known Christian a-hole sporting an ordination to the ministry. Chivington was nick-named the “Fighting Parson,” originally for shooting it out with his pro-slavery critics in Kansas. But his exploits with his volunteer, mob-militia in Colorado, were clearly a strategy he learned in the Missouri and Illinois anti-Mormon extermination attempts. At Sand Creek he rode ahead of his troops, gloriously blessing their atrocities as they cleansed the land of heathen filth:
I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces … With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors … By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops …
—- John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865[18]
Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch …
—- Stan Hoig[19]
Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek. His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer ‘spose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things? I tell you what, I don’t like a hostile red skin any more than you do. And when they are hostile, I’ve fought ‘em, hard as any man. But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would.
—- Kit Carson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
Today, there are few Americans of any serious religious or political stripe who would ever excuse, much less praise, the dark and evil deeds of so-called “Christian Soldiers” like John Chivington. And nobody pretends that they didn’t work this savagery openly in their day, and with the blessing of Christian America and its most prominent and respected Christian clergy. Today, most Christians even shy away from their historically boasted claims to a complete and exclusive Christian license to do with America as they please in the name of God by force of arms. Or as Chivinton once said:
By the grace of God and these two revolvers, I am going to preach here today.
Bu
t then, Chivington made this boast in conjunction with preaching Abolitionism to southern hillbilly rednecks, and his Northern Abolitionist fans, the victors who wrote the now canonized media accounts and attendant histories, made him into a hero for it. Joe Smith made the same arguments without guns and Missouri put him in jail for it. Missouri burned and bloodied his people for it. In Illinois he ran for president on an abolitionist ticket and a mob of proto-KKK hooligans killed him for it. And when Joe Smith pulled a couple of pistols and tried to defend himself in that action, today’s Mormon Holocaust deniers actually try to say that Smith’s manly response proves he’s not a martyr. Joe Smith went out fighting for his life they claim, so that essentially makes him just as guilty as the mob of Christians who killed him, and no real hero at all.
http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/nauvoo-and-the-myth-of-mormonisms-persecuted-innocence/
http://www.equip.org/articles/the-martyrdom-of-joseph-smith
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/martyr_joseph.htm
http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith/Martyrdom/Qualification_as_martyr
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2572018/posts
The point isn’t whether or not Joe Smith surrendering to an obviously hostile conspiracy against him, even though he was quite at liberty to flee their wrath, is really “going like a lamb to the slaughter,” as he put it. The point is, the ancestors of the Christians playing these semantic games today, are the ones who killed Joseph Smith even though he had submitted to their promises of protection, justice, and a fair trial. He was trapped, helpless, and undefended, (as they presumed) and was innocent in the eyes of the law.
So whatever poor Joe Smith was, the real question is, what does that make the Christians who promised him justice and a fair hearing, and instead, promoted, authorized, and gleefully celebrated his death by such treachery? What does that make of the modern Christian anti-Mormonist who would seriously even descend to this desperately low-level of quibbling? It makes their forefathers murderers, and them, apologists for murderers.
Most Christians now confess the sinful nature of their treatment of Native Americans in the founding of the United States. Most modern Christians repent of their disgraceful treatment of African slaves in the New World. And some of them even realize they compounded the simple evil of killing off Indians to take their lands, by then building slave-driven cotton plantations powered by tortured Africans, and justifying it by way of a well-considered Biblical argument executed in the name of Jesus Christ. I’d even wager that most Christians today willingly concede that the white, Anglo-European, Christian colonization of most of the undeveloped world was carried out in an oppressive, cruel, and shameful fashion. How odd it is then, that so damned few of these same modern, allegedly enlightened Christians, even the most liberal of them, will admit that those same 19th and 20th century Christian forces of world colonization, their ancestral heroes of Christian domination and subjection, treated Mormons in exactly the same belligerent, aggressively oppressive, cruel, and shameful fashion in which they treated any other “heathens” around the globe as they expanded their religious, political and social empires.
…Silas Soule, a commander of a cavalry company who refused to attack the Cheyenne at Sand Creek
, testified against Colonel Chivington. His testimony was key in the committees findings that the attack on Sand Creek was "a cowardly and coldblooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy, and the face of every American with shame and indignation." Silos Soule never had the opportunity to hear the committees findings because he was shot near his home in Denver by Charles W. Squiers of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry. Sadly, the Indian Peace Commission led to the forced relocation of native peoples to Indian reservations and did not result in the criminal prosecution of Colonel Chivington. Instead, the state of Colorado named a city after Chivington to honor his "heroic" military campaigns during the civil war.
http://www.judybaca.com/now/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=65&limitstart=1
While Christian America was gleefully celebrating the butchery of Chivington’s glorious “victory” against unarmed Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek, the Mormons were hiding out in the mountains next-door, attempting to shelter themselves from the same Christian bastards who had repeatedly threatened them with the same Holy Christian slaughter and extermination from region to region in the New World, as they fled their pious Christian persecutors. Mormonism had already suffered the same sort of grisly Christian gore-fest that Chivington later imported to the Rocky Mountains. The clergy-led cruelty and mutilation at Haun’s Mill and the Siege, rape, plunder and pillage of Far West were probably the very models for Chivington’s tactics against Native American Populations in Colorado. Christian America had sworn that all impediments would fall before the comprehensively expanding Christian franchise on the North American Continent, and by God, Christian warriors like Chivington were eager to join the fight.
http://1857massacre.com/MMM/danites_p8.htm
http://www.quaqua.org/extermination.htm
Surely, Christianity disagreed violently with itself upon the issue of slavery. Christianity was however, fairly united in its views upon the continued threat of both the Mormon and Indian presence in its empire. In my reading at least, nobody else has historically been discerning enough to see the overt connection between the times and fates of these two American cultural deviants. But these two peoples were historically joined at the hip:
In the beginning, Appalachian Bible-thumping rednecked hicks chased out the local Indians with fire and sword, leaving them to struggle and die in the unsettled wilderness to their west, simply so they could take Native American lands and resources, and be free of their heathen presence. Then the hillbillies imported and birthed and filled up Appalachia with so many new rednecked hicks that they could no longer find land and fortunes in the piney woods of Georgia, or the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, the Carolinas and eastern environs. A new generation of hicks became even more determined to make good on the God-promised American dream. They moved west to buy cheap land and construct their fantasized cotton plantations full of slaves and outbuildings. In Missouri, then the far west, they found Yankee and foreign Mormons moving in, buying up their land, outbidding them, driving up the prices, and 
out-competing them in agriculture and industry. They had a great friend in their patron saint Andrew Jackson, who was now president of the United States. They had a governor who depended upon their raggedy-arsed hillbilly votes. So once again, they simply drove the Mormon heretics out of their state by fire and sword, canon and ball, like their parents had done to the Indian heathens.
Now, don’t take just my word on it when I call the anti-Mormonists of the Missouri, Nauvoo, and Utah Mormon war or Mountain Meadows eras hicks and hillbillies. Even pro-hillbilly Christian historians and Journalists openly acknowledge the huge rift between the educated, industrialized, Northeastern American, and Northern European Mormons who actually wore shoes and shirts even on hot days, and the anti-Mormon country rubes they politely called “Old Settlers” from over in Tennessee and other regions of the eastern American woods and weeds, in their rope-tied, gunny-sack trousers and flour-sack shirts, desperate to escape their low social status and poverty in the settled United States.
(But you can’t escape stupid. It followed them everywhere they went.)
Inauguration
Main article: Andrew Jackson 1829 presidential inauguration
Jackson was the first President to invite the public to attend the White House ball honoring his first inauguration. Many poor people came to the inaugural ball in their homemade clothes. The crowd became so large that Jackson’s guards could not keep them out of the White House, which became so crowded with people that dishes and decorative pieces inside were eventually broken. Some people stood on good chairs in muddied boots just to get a look at the President. The crowd had become so wild that the attendants poured punch in tubs and put it on the White House lawn to lure people outside. Jackson’s raucous populism earned him the nickname "King Mob".
Driven even farther west by these Born-Again cretins, the Mormons and Indians ended up in the Intermountain West, living mostly happily amongst themselves for a while. But then, the California and Oregon Territories became the new west. America’s Christian revolutionary forces had expanded their WASP-only program across the whole continent. That put the Mormons and the Indians once again smack in the middle of Christian America’s road to California gold and intercontinental mastery.
To Christian America’s leadership, both the native “savages” and the heretical Mormons were not human beings with God-given rights, to bargain or reason with. These ungodly creatures were merely seen as impediments to Christian rule. They were Satanically-inspired, soulless animals that could only be controlled by killing them all off. Again, the mobs that killed Mormons were not random street gatherings, they were directed, orchestrated, and very often led by Christian clergy, and this quite openly. The rape, torture and slaughter didn’t happen incidentally, it was the whole point. It was Christian terrorism.
For all its particular horror, Sand Creek was not unique in the long history of Christian conquests. In John Chivington, we do not have an aberration. John Chivington was an 
immensely popular, mainstream, period, frontier-Christian minister who was given unanimous civil and military authority to execute Christian America’s mandate upon the non-Christian. He did what Christianity has always done when given civil and military authority to enforce its demands upon others.
The Sand Creek massacre is a pattern of Christian behavior that arises inevitably out of the fundamental Christian belief that Christians are superior to and have dominion over all other life forms, human or otherwise. It is a pattern of behavior openly and proudly repeated from Constantine to the Inquisition, to Calvin’s Geneva, to the Salem Witch Trials, to open warfare against Mormons and Indians in Christianity’s “final solution” to both problems in the American west.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_West,_Missouri
http://www.farwesthistory.com/haunbro.asp
While Indians were hated, feared, dehumanized, and despised by white Christian settlers and their clerical puppet masters, to period Christianity, even worse than that, Mormons were race traitors and heretics.
But then again, in a pragmatic sense, what really inflamed the anti-Mormon violence, the true source of the political and legal desperation to be rid of them, what ultimately got them driven into the wilderness of Utah, is simply that Mormons were in the road. Mormons and Indians were impeding progress. Most of America agreed upon that much. And that’s what enabled the violent fanatics to have their way with them both. Cleaning up the west was deemed a necessary outgrowth of America’s Manifest Destiny. You couldn’t stop that. God was behind that. Much of America felt sorry about it all, but resigned: Let the Mormons fight it out for themselves. Let the Indians adjust or die off.
Unfortunately, Mormons were not just pesky outsiders who kept occupying land that the good Christian
common folk wanted. Mormons took even crap land and built small empires in the wilderness at an alarming pace. The Native American populations were no such threat to the “natural order” of the new nation. They were rapidly being culturally nullified and whittled into isolated, politically and militarily powerless reservations where they were supposed to wither away into an ignominious extinction. The Mormons on the other hand, were flourishing no matter how brutally they were oppressed, and no matter where they were driven. They were smart. They knew the law, the Constitution. They were free and white. They had lawyers. They had rights and they knew it.
(Mormons also riled up the negroes and the Indians, and put all sorts of ideas about rights in their heads too.)
Mormonism’s Christian foes knew that Mormons were perfectly entitled under the Constitution to buy as much land as they wanted, and then build and grow their own booming religious community along the lines of their own faith and customs. That was the promise of the United States of America. That’s exactly what the Christians were trying to do. Indians, they had no rights, just out of a national sense of conquering white bigotry. White, Christian America didn’t have to negotiate with them about anything if it wasn’t in a charitable mood at the given moment. But the only way to rid a Christian America of the Mormon pests was to prove somehow that Mormonism was a demonstrable threat to Christian liberty, and an enemy of Constitutional rule. White-on-white persecution was far more difficult to rationalize.
For generations, America’s Calvinist legal approach against Mormonism amounted merely to repeating attempts in various legal venues to prove that anyone claiming to talk to God was inherently dangerous, and should be
wiped from the face of the map therefore by force of arms. The operative claim was simply that Mormons were loyal to their prophet, not the United States of America, and therefore could not be trusted. It was the same reasoning used in America’s white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant anti-Roman Catholic gambit. Whether or not they were doing anything imminently threatening, illegal, or un-Constitutional was irrelevant. It was just a matter of time it was claimed, before Christian America woke up to find itself the prisoner of Mormonism. (Or in the latter case, a slave of the Pope.) Once that paranoid fear had been sold to the general public, the anti-Mormonists assumed, any excuse or pretext for immediate, terminal action against the Latter-day Saints would suffice. It turned out in the end however, that the American public wasn’t buying that proposition very much outside the inbred southern, fundamentalist hillbilly factions who kepts habitually making their homes around the various Mormon settlement. To most of America, Mormons just didn’t seem all that dangerous and disloyal. In fact, to some, Mormons seemed quite productive, peaceful, and reasonable.
In the words of Brigham Young:
"I love the government and the Constitution of the United States, but I do not love the damned rascals that administer the government."
It wasn’t long however, before the crazed revivalists of American Christianity occupied Utah Territory in full force and vigor. Its crusaders grabbed hold of the issue of Mormonism’s Biblically justified practice of plural marriage and whittled it into a stout bludgeon. With this one weapon alone, nothing more than a few words on a piece of paper, Christian America beat Mormonism all to hell with it in the courts, Congress, and legislatures.
(Actually, there is no proscription of plural marriage in the Bible. It’s a Roman social custom the Church just picked up and it stuck. But Christianity doesn’t just rule out of the Bible, it has to be their Bible, and their interpretation of their Bible. Whoever they are at the time…)
When Mormonism looked to the Supreme Court to defend its marriage practices, the Supreme Court decided no, religious belief can’t be regulated, but religious practice can. It decided that Freedom of religion only extends insofar as said religion complies with accepted western social custom, and civil authority has every right 
to regulate or define matrimony according to prevailing social custom. In that day of course, this meant according to historical, Protestant Christian convention.
But prevailing social custom has changed radically since then, hasn’t it? Calvin doesn’t rule the streets of America any more—unless it’s Calvin Klein. Think about it you Lefties out there:
I’ll see your gay marriage and raise you two wives….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._United_States
http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/page.aspx?pid=664
Unlike its final solution to the “Indian Problem,” the forces of America’s Christian status-quo preserved their dominance over Mormonism through the pen, not the sword. After Mountain Meadows, after the Utah War, outraged Christian clergy and a few pandering politicians back east rallied t
hemselves into a flurry of protest over the Mormon assault upon free, white, "innocent" Christian citizens of the United States. For many reasons none of this outrage caught on nationally. The dirty secret of that is, nobody in civilized America felt obliged to start a full-scale war with Brigham Young out in the boonies over a few wagonloads of Arkansas hillbillies and a handful of Missouri pukes. Coldly stated, but entirely true. Consequently, no great national Christian vengeance was returned on behalf of the only casualties of the Utah war of 1857, 120 adult-only members of the California-bound immigrant Fancher Party, consisting mostly of the Arkansas-based Fancher and Baker families, and their hired Missouri trail hands.
Glenn Beck Part 4: My Favorite Klingon
By 1963 there wasn’t a mainstream corporate sponsor or conservative organization that would have anything to do with Willard Cleon Skousen. The American Security Council kicked his arse out saying he’d gone off the deep end. William C. Mott, judge advocate general of the US Navy and ASC member said Skousen was “money mad…totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen
That year, Robert Welch, John Birch Society founder, claimed that president Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and Skousen jumped on it with both feet. Skousen’s clients threw him to the curb. The National Association of Manufacturers, formely gracious anti-Communist sponsors of Skousen’s speaking tours, released an official condemnation of both Skousen and the John Birch Society, expressing its intent to disassociate itself from any individual or party who subscribed to their views. Skousen just wrapped his critics into the conspiracy and authored a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”
Except for every High Priest Group in Mormondom, Klingon Skousen laid low for a lot of the ’60s. When he resurfaced at the end of the decade he was promulgating a new family of conspiracies that bundled all the world’s problems into the doings of the capitalist “dynastic rich,” as he called them. Specifically, Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. These culprits Skousen now claimed, were using communist and leftist agents like Ho Chi Minh and the American civil rights movement to accomplish their evil goals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related
In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).
Skousen claimed in The Naked Communist that Commies were out to take over the world because they were evil dominators of the human soul.
In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
…Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium.
Skousen warns readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:
. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”
To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:
“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”
(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)
Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:
“Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.
“Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”
The Naked Capitalist on the other hand, now claimed that Communists were only puppets of the dynastic rich. The Council of Foreign Relations and other Liberal internationalist groups were really the minions of these ultra-rich, who wanted to manipulate world events and nations into a single One World Government, or a New World Order.
Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
…”The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
At this point Skousen became the Godfather of countless offshoots and Skousen cells in every conspiratorially oriented organization on the face of the planet. He boasted before he was done, of authoring 44 books and pamphlets, but in my father’s words, he actually just wrote the same book 44 times. His diatribes, particularly corrupted every priesthood quorum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You could also say he infiltrated the Boy Scouts as well, because in the LDS church they are one and the same. The LDS church is the single largest affiliate of Scouting USA. Entering the 1970’s Skousen led the charge against the American Civil Rights Movement. ET Benson’s grandson Steve writes:
Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.” The article asserted that:
” . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”
Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”
He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”
Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:
” . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.”
In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:
“. . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . . Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .” [1976]
Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”
Skousen further declared:“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”
He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.” [1987]
[Skousen had also previously claimed that the US would fall to Communism by 1973.]
In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:
“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.
(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431
Unable to content himself with any single paranoid theory, Skousen moved from frantic brainfart of idiocy to frantic brainfart of idiocy, as one world-ending conspiracy and one set of heinous traitors after another failed to bring America down into Satanic bondage. In 1971, Skousen founded The Freeman Institute, which claimed it intended to provide BYU students a place to read both sides of any political issue from original sources. The truth is, it got weirder and weirder until was thrown off campus In 1982. It was probably no coincidence that church president Spencer W Kimball was announcing the construction of a temple behind the Iron Curtain in Freiberg Germany, and BYU president Dallin Oaks was battling with world academia to maintain the university’s scholarly credibility in light of Skousen’s wild-arsed political and “historical” hackings, and the spawn of similarly eccentric BYU “scholars” like Hugh Nibley and others, who were inventing the pretend science of “Book of Mormon Archeology,” linking Joseph Smith to ancient Egyptian texts, and delving into Masonic, folk-magic and mystical connections to all of the above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Nibley
By 1983, Skousen’s Freeman Institute had re-branded itself the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), and headquartered itself in a survivalist compound in Malta, Idaho. Most importantly, it would be dead as a doornail right now if not for Glenn frigging Beck…
In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with theConstitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[19][20] Skousen’s proposals with the group included a plan to convert the Social Security system to private retirement accounts, as well as a plan that he claimed would completely wipe out the national debt.
Although Skousen was not a tax protester, he did campaign for several proposals to eliminate the federal income tax. One proposal, the Liberty Amendment, precluded the federal government from involvement in any activities that competed with private enterprise and returned federally-owned land to the states.
In 1987, controversy erupted in California when the state briefly considered using Skousen’s book, The Making of America, as a textbook for California schools. Statements in the book regarding slavery, and its use of the term “pickaninny” as a label for slave children engendered a heated debate as to whether the book was appropriate.
…In one instance, the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”[18]
Now, some of Skousen’s political proposals admittedly sound fine to me. His history however, is rubbish. His obsession with finding a Commie or “Insider” under every bed is embarassingly naïve. In fairness, scholars would likely say the same thing about my scribblings. But I don’t care what “scholars” think any more than Cleon Skousen did, so here’s my main point for you Glenn Beck: Skousen’s fairly rapid demise had been set in motion in his affiliation particularly with Tim LaHaye and their Born Again, evangelical dynasty. What had begun to happen was a homogenization of Mormon loony conspiracy freaks with more mainstream Christian Republican Conservative political organizations. That’s a lot like your ministry Glenn. And by no accident I’m sure, as a Skousen acolyte. The Christian Right however, is Christian. Even if they liked Skousen’s patriotic, conspiratorial lippping-off to the Powers-That-Be, Klingon Skousen and his Mormon zealots already figured into the very center of most of the era’s expanding Apocalyptic Christian conspiracy theories. The more Mormon folklore Skousen worked into the conversations in his primarily Christian Conservative think-tanks, the more his Christian “friends” began to think that they didn’t want Mormons coming to the rescue of the Constitution.
There is no “Nephite Cycle” in the Bible. There is no “White Horse Prophecy” in Christendom. Skousen was just too weird, too insanely desperate to save America, too embarrassingly obvious in his belief that Mormons were Christians, too clearly earnest in his professions that Mormons are going to save the world for Christ, and that Mormonism would be the Constitutional Army of Liberation in America, not the Christian Right.
The bottom line is, Christians have no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. The Constitution is an enlightened document. It arose out of Deism, Masonry, and the European Enlightenment, not the Bible. For God’s sake, for the sake of all mankind, for the benefit of all that is holy, you cannot look at the concepts in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, and connect them with the oppressive tenets of “Historic Christianity.”
Even ignoring all his other lunacy, Skousen was fundamentally suicidal in falling into lock-step with Christian Nation theories. Declaring America a Christian Nation leads to Carthage Jail, Liberty Jail, the Haun’s Mill Massacre, Johnson’s Army and an American Geneva based upon Calvin’s oppressive “Christian” model.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Which brings me again brother Beck, to your personal political pornography, throughwhich you must enjoy yourself immensely and repeatedly if your gushing commentaries are any indication: The Five Thousand Year Leap. This is Klingon Skousen’s “inspired” masterpiece:
Since this book was all over the New York Times bestseller list in 2009, and generated an unprecedented interest in this until-now obscure author, it deserves an extended discussion. The book is an analysis of the Founding Fathers of the United States and their political and economic beliefs, written from a decidedly conservative (in the modern American sense) point of view, but the content is not particularly explicitly Mormon to the degree that would alienate readers of other faiths. The title of the book refers to both the author’s belief that the earth was about 5000 years old at the time of the founding of the United States, and also that social and economic progress took a great 5000 year leap forward nearly instantaneously upon the founding of the United States after centuries of slow progress and stagnation. The book was originally published in the wake of a conservative shift in American politics around the time of the election of Ronald Reagan, and more specifically in the context of a western U.S. protest movement against federal land policies circa 1981 known as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” which was especially strong in the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.
The book begins with a discussion of the political spectrum. Skousen asserts that the view of the “far right” as Fascism and the “far left” as Communism is erroneous and that Fascism and Communism are really the same thing: “ruler’s law” (or, law dictated by a single ruler or party). He proposes that a more accurate political spectrum would be: “far right” is anarchy or no government, “far left” is any form of “ruler’s law” or
totalitarianism, and the political center is a limited representative government of, by and for the people. The first section moves on to a discussion of the Founding Fathers and places both the Jeffersonian Democrats and the Hamiltonian Federalists in the political center of their day. He draws parallels between the laws and government of the ancient Israelites and Anglo-Saxon common law (and, although Skousen shows no sign of believing in British Israelism himself, cites a British Israelist writer – Howard B. Rand – as his source on this) and asserts that both were the basis of the U.S. Constitution. He believes the first attempt at forming a United States government in the Articles of Confederation failed because they erred too far toward his definition of the right (anarchy), while the strong-central-government faction of the Federalists and most European monarchieserred too far to the left (ruler’s law). The United States Constitution, on the other hand, was right in the center where it should have been. He attributes this to “28 principles” which he believes the Founders held to, and make up the second portion of the book:
- Natural law as the legitimate basis of government (he defines natural law here as divine law derived from God)
- A virtuous and moral people
- Virtuous and moral leaders
- Without religion a government of free people cannot be maintained
- All things were created by God
- All men are created equal
- Equal rights, not equal things
- Unalienable rights
- To protect man’s rights, God has revealed divine law
- Sovereignty of the people
- The majority of the people may alter or abolish a tyrannical government
- Republican form of government (“a republic, not a democracy”)
- Protection of the people against the human frailty of their rulers
- Property rights
- Free-market economics
- Separation of powers
- Checks and balances
- Importance of a written Constitution
- Limited powers of government
- Majority rule, minority rights
- Strong local self-government
- Government by law, not by men
- An educated electorate
- Peace through strength
- Avoid entangling alliances
- Protecting the role of the family
- Avoiding the burden of debt
- The United States has a “manifest destiny” to be a blessing to the entire human race
A fascinating mix, that. Many of these principles nobody would argue with; they are foundational to liberal democracy and representative government. Many of them however
try to make the case that liberal democracy (Skousen prefers them term “republic” over “democracy”) and representative government can only exist when they are rooted in religion, specificallyChristianity; and that the Founders were God-fearing Christians and this (rather than, say, the values of the European Enlightenment, freethought, and liberal views on religion such asDeism) were what guided the Founders. This attempt at shoehorning liberal representative government together with essentially theocratic views makes this book an early example of a genre of historical revisionism that has since become a staple within the religious right, such as the books by David Barton. Glenn Beck is a Mormon convert and it is likely that this is the reason that out of all the thousands of possible books he could have picked, he chose to bring Skousen’s book out of obscurity as a sort of manifesto; much of the religious right has instead been promoting the more recent books by David Barton. Beck seems to have picked up on the cue and now frequently has Barton on his television and radio shows to promote his
nonsenseviews. Beck’s promotion of Skousen’s work has led many ultraright conservatives to embrace Skousen’s distortion of the political spectrum, mainly for the purposes of blaming both Communism and Nazism on the left.
For you Gentiles out there, I’m not going to beat this White Horse to death. I’ll just summarize my thoughts by saying The 5000 Year Creep doesn’t give me either religious or political orgasms in the way Glenn Beck seems to experience the book. I’d simply say it’s his least asinine work.
Highlighted by Skousen’s self-damning ignorance of basic Christian theology, there are a number of elements in Glenn Beck’s confused potpourri of populist paranoia that are simply suicidal to Mormonism or any other non-Christian belief system. The first of these is buying into any suggestion that the Constitution of the United States of America is born of “Christian” roots. Anyone who knows anything about Christian history would not find that very enticing, even if he were a Christian.
Christians simply don’t know what’s good for them, and a Christian Nation isn’t good for anyone, not even them. If the nation is Christian, the State defines Christianity and stifles any competing theology. That’s not a good thing. To the average Christian idiot, it sounds great. The Founding Fathers weren’t however, the average Christian idiots.
Make the State Christian, and there’s always the chance you wouldn’t be the right sort of Christian, and end up on the rack or being publicly roasted. Facts are facts, and that’s exactly what every “Christian” society has done—when it was not engaged in the wholesale extermination of non-Christians or “heretical” Christians as it re-defined itself from time to time or its subjects found inspiration in other ideas. And Mormons are not Christians. Mormons would not only be seriously screwed-over in a “Christian Nation,” they already have been. Constantly and repeatedly from day-one. To believe otherwise makes you a lackey pawn, a dupe of what Christian Nation Crusader James Kennedy called “The Holy Conpiracy.”
And how did the Holy Conspiracy work its way around the Contitutional protection of Mormonism Glenn? Do you remember? Do you even know?
In a letter to William Short Thomas Jefferson wrote:
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. [13 April, 1820.]
Perhaps it’s Thomas Jefferson who should be called a prophet here? What else was going on in April of 1820 or thereabouts by the way…say in rural New York? And does this quote from Finis Ewing, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the most famous Presbyterian in the history of Morm
onism ring a bell?
The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.
Well Glenn, at first Christianity tried to just charge Joseph Smith with plain old heresy—again and again, from New York to Missouri, and when the charges never stuck they tried wrapping heresy around fraud or some other actual legal claim and they still never got Joseph nailed properly after scores of hearings and trials. Then the good Christian ministers of Daviess County Missouri held a little meeting of all the prominent clergy, civil officials, and leading citizens in the fellowship hall. Over coffee and treats they agreed that the Constitution didn’t offer sufficient protection from Mormonism, and if they didn’t do something about it they’d be overrun with Mormon and quickly be the minority vote in the region. So they penned out their own “Secret Constitution,” which the Mormons called the “Mob Manifesto,” in which the swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to eradicate Mormonism through any means necessary.
The Holy Conspiracy initially discovered that if you bully Mormons away from a public polling place during an election, they beat the crap out of you. They next discovered that if you shoot at Mormons trying to vote they shoot back. Then they learned that if they shot back they could call the governor, who was part of the conspiracy to negate the Mormon vote in the first place, and he’ll gratefully issue an order of extermination for you on the grounds of treason and insurrection. Only the fact that Mormons are pretty damned good with a rifle slowed this genocidal effort down enough that God eventually reached enough still-functionally “Christian” hearts that the regional population, the national population in general, began to ask, hey, isn’t burning, beating, raping, pillaging, slaughtering and tormenting plain dumb white men women and children sort of er, evil or something? (Injins, niggers–yeah. No problem. But white folks?)
When the local Christian clergy tried to get the Mormons eradicated again in Illinois, the Holy Conspiracy had learned its lesson well from Missouri. You didn’t need secret meetings and blood oaths. You didn’t need to try to construct a treatise of your legal or moral apologetics to justify your actions. All you had to do was publish abroad Christ’s permission to exterminate the Mormon heretics and take anything you want of them for plunder, and either just out of greed, bloodlust or even missplaced “Christian” zeal, via the “will no one rid me 
of this troublesome priest?” principle, a mob will cheerfully arise to oblige. You don’t need to control the whole state militia, all you need is a key officer or two, a mob-friendly detatchment or so, and once they start hollering and shooting and point at the “enemy,” the rest of the regiment will just join in out of reflex. Once you have the Mormons shooting back to defend themselves, well, the game is on, no more explanations necessary. Look at the Mormons. They’re shooting at us. Better kill them all before they do the same to us.
But even the Illinois tactics were transparent enough that “Christians” throughout the nation looked at the “mob” violence of Nauvoo and Carthage, and while nobody could directly claim this time that actual ministers of God were leading the charge under the Christian flag, it was still condemned as inexcusably uncivilized, whether Joe Smith and the Mormons had it coming or not. Sure, in Missouri they tried to trans-substantiate “heresy” into “insurrection” or “treason” but never got it to stick. So again, after a lot of manoevering and legal bullshite, Joseph Smith’s critics in Nauvoo managed to hang “treason” on his “heresy” for acting as chair of the city council and condemning an anti-Mormon printing press. That’s what actually got him killed mind you. But like Missouri, Smith never ended up in court. In Missouri he was allowed to escape to save the state the embarassment of trying to explain their extermination order and resulting attempted genocide. In Carthage Illinois, the militia “guards” protecting Smith just parted one night and let a barely disguised mob of their fellows up the stairs to shoot the hell out of him. Again, it saved the Holy Conspiracy from all the Constitutional bickering and Christianity as usual got what it wanted without the incumberance of due process.
In Utah, the Holy Conspiracy first denied Mormonism admittance to the union as its own State of Deseret,
despite more than meeting all requirements. As a state Mormons would be free to be the majority, grow, populate, civilize, and vote their own conscience and cultural or regional interests like any other citizen other of the United States. Congress however, amid much debate, admitted Utah only as a territory, where it could be administered directly by the Christian Congress.
When Brigham Young got tired of the cronies, whores, and carpetbaggers Washington kept sending out to profiteer off the blood and sweat of the Saints, as Governor, he fired an apparently unreliable guy named Magraw from the mail service, because Mormons had long been maintaining supply trails and outposts from coast-to-coast and simply tagging mail service onto the regular Mormon cargo contracts was faster and cheaper. Magraw turned out not surprizingly to have been awarded his 
mail contract via his well-placed Washington cronies, and like a good little Holy Conspirator, once again cried that the whole territory was in bondage of Brigham Young and disloyal to the United States. This resulted in Congress appointing a Christian governor, and sending him to usurp Brigham Young with an army of occupation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War
After a little drama, the Mormons let the new governor come right on in. The army, well, just so they got the message, that they starved out for a year, cut off and surrounded, vulnerable in the canyon. Cummings, the new guy, negotiated entry of the army, and basically nothing much happened. He reported back that nothing much seemed to be going on in the territory worth mentioning and wondered what all the fuss was about. But, the Christian camel having poked its nose into the Mormon tent, eventually the whole beast forced its way inside. And again, Christianity found it could do nothing much about Mormonism. Until it discovered polygamy.
And here’s where the Holy Conspiracy learned it could do with a stroke of the pen what it had been trying to do for decades through all the combined violence of modern warfare: they made polygamy illegal. No, it wasn’t already illegal. Nobody had thought to make it illegal. But this was Calvin’s America, and The Holy Conspiracy forged the polygamy issue into a sword it then aimed at the heart of Mormonism:
Reynolds v. United States (1878)
This was the first of the Mormon cases. Congress had passed a law making it a criminal offense to
commit bigamy in any of the territories under control of the Federal government. The defendant, charged with violating this law, asserted as a defense that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and that its doctrines required him to practice polygamy or plural marriage. He claimed further that enforcement of the law against him would violate his religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court rejected this contention and affirmed the conviction….
Marriage, the Court held, is a relationship created, regulated, and protected by civil authority. The monogamous family is the basis of Western societal life, and it was never doubted that government had the power to preserve it by prohibiting polygamy. The fact that the defendant’s religious convictions require him to practice polygamy no more immunizes him from the operation of the law than would a person’s religious belief in human sacrifice immunize him from the operation of the laws against homicide. To permit religious beliefs to justify polygamy would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and would in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself….
Page 109, Church and State in the United States , Anson Phelps Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, 1964, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
The Court’s reasoning isn’t even out of the Bible. It just pays lip-service to Christian tradition using the code-word “Western societal life” without any Biblical or Constitutional justification at all. Ignoring the spurious human sacrifice analogy, what this ruling actually does it wrest from the hands of God, the formerly Holy Bonds of Matrimony, and surrendered the institution of marriage to the authority of civil officers, who are now, by this precedent, free to administer it according to any currently popular social conventions. Like Gay marriage. Or at this point, polygamy.
Well Christianity, be careful what you wish for—you might get it. You put marriage under civil jurisdiction to feck over the Mormons, and now it’s your turn. You made marriage a strictly social and political issue, and now you’re on the losing side of the social argument, aren’t you? Payback’s a bitch isn’t she? And she doesn’t even make you breakfast in the morning.
Here, anyone wondering why Harry Reid might be a Democrat and a Mormon too ought to have a little look at this:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jishs/101.3-4/vitale.html
It’s a historical overview explaining how Joseph Smith voted Democrat as well, and more importantly why. As a matter of fact Glenn, in spite of self-righteous Far-Right elitists like yourself and Skousen, rather a helluva lot of Mormons are Democrats. A bunch of them are actually socialists. Probably a lot of actual Communist Party members of the church by now. It’s a big wide world.. It’s not all about Chief Skousen brown-nosing General Authorities and scaring the hell out of them with tales of world-shaking evil headed their way: Howdy brethren–what’s shakin’ on temple square today brother this and elder that. Have you heard the one about the Commie who snuck the tape recorder into the Endowment session and played it all on CCCP1?
OK, I’ll condense it: Joseph Smith was a Democrat because the Democrats like president James Buchannan initially argued that Mormons should be able to have their own state and make their own laws as they saw fit. Because the Democrats, not the Republicans, argued that the Consitution protected religious practices like plural marriages. Because the Democrats argued that specifically in polygamy there is no crime or peril to the greater good from what consenting adults want to get up to in the private sovereignty of their own homes and their own beds. Democrats argued that the citizens of a state or territory ought to be able to rule on the matter themselves according to their own social norms.
The Republicans, like party founder Justin Smith Morrill on the other hand, were arguing that Mormons were heretics and polygamy was as barbarous as slavery, and Mormons had no right to self-government in a “civilized” read: Christian, society:
Under the guise of religion, this people has established, and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world…. As well might religion be invoked to protect cannibalism or infanticide. Yet we are told, because our Constitution declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency that artful men may seek to hide, under the name of religion! However, it is impossible to twist the Constitution into the service of polygamy by any fair construction…. Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?
Sounds a bit like the Glenn Beck show. Or old recordings of Cleon Skousen.
Once Christianity finally had something with which to “legally” skewer the Mormons, once they’d essentially made at least one purely Biblical doctrine unique to Mormonism illegal on purely “Christian” grounds, they sharpened their anti-polygamy blades keener with every passing year. They wrote into laws test oaths that denied Mormons the right to vote. They defined as “treason,” not the practice of, but the mere belief in
polygamy as a Biblically correct principle. Then they made even being a member of an organization that believed plural marriage to be Biblically correct, a confession of “treason.” Then they declared all the lands, funds and properties of any “treasonous” organization should be forfeit to the territorial civil authorities. They banned Mormons from running for office, so soon all civil officers in the territory were appointed by Christians in Congress, or were fellow Christians elected by a tiny Christian minority who ruled the vast Mormon majority of the region.
I want to make this clear, and not just for you Glenn Beckers, neo-Skousenites, or other religious types reading this: The Holy Conspiracy, the “Christian Nation” and its “Christian” Supreme Court, ruled in 1878, that it was perfectly legal and Constitutional to deny anyone who disagrees with “Historic Christianity’s” system of beliefs the right to participate in American politics as either voter or candidate, to own land, property, or associate with like-minded Americans. Mormons were the first official victims of actual “thought crime” legislation. Christians used this one doctrinal tool, this one almost universally agreed-to but utterly harmless Mormon Biblical oddity, to systematically strip the Mormons of every scrap of property they had. They literally stole all Mormon edifices and meetinghouses and rented them back to the church under State supervision at great profit. They made every wife a Mormon husband could be proved to have cohabitated with, a crime punishable by five years in prison. They broke up families, threw old men in jail to rot and die and left the destitute, breadwinnerless wives and children to fend for themselves.
(And of course, they carefully wrote their anti-polygamy laws so the Army and teams of Washington carpetbaggers infesting the state could continue to hump and whore around as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t set up housekeeping or make their multiple-partnered sex a legitimate, permanent arrangement.)
Glenn. That’s how a “Christan Nation” works bub. Sorry. Just is. I’m not guessing here. You’re the guy who keeps telling us to learn from history before it’s too late.
Physician heal thyself.
Christians own their own damned label. I don’t want to fight over it. In any case, Mormons can’t simply steal it and redefine the word as they see fit. That may play well in Provo, but one Mormon backwater town in the desert doesn’t amount to diddly squat in the world of politics and religion—or even the world of dictionaries. The last thing in the universe a Mormon would want to do is hand over Constitutional sovereignty to a bunch of hard-core, Bible-thumping Christians. The Founding Fathers defeated these “Historical” Christians in writing the Constitution. They pulled one over on them–Joke’s on you Calvin, Wesley, Arminius, Augustine, Luther, Pope One and Pope Two. The Great Architect of the Universe faked-out all of history’s so-called “Christians” who had been thus far perpetually claiming to worship Him via beating the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them. The religious and intellectual rebels on the Constitutional panel with free and truly inspired hearts and minds wrote God’s true will into the Constitution instead.
That’s the Mormon position Glenn. That’s Joseph Smith’s “Original Argument.” If you believe Joseph Smith that is, rather than Klingon Skousen. I know who I’ll go with. How about you?
America is not a Christian Nation and I and grateful for that. America is a pluralistic, free republic, and open
religious society. We should all thank God, or the Deity of choice for it. Or no Deity at all. Thank the Founding Fathers. You may think me a weird-arse bigot and pinhead for believing anything in Mormonism, but the Constitution allows me to be a pinhead and bigot, and believe anything I want. I just don’t get to exercise my bigotry. That would infringe upon the rights of other citizens who are mutually protected by the Constitution. I can talk about it all I want though. And Glenn, one more time: That sort of religious liberty is not a Christian concept. Period.
Everybody gets their say, and nobody gets to hurt the other guy for saying it. God Bless America. Nature’s God.
Glenn Beck, you and your new “ghost” writing partner, the specter of Klingon Skousen, want to destroy America. You want to destroy the Constitution in order to save the Constitution. You want to put sinners who play cards or curse or skip church in stocks. You want to imprison or drive out homosexuals and free thinkers and scholars and anyone who would care to argue with the clergy to die alone in the wilderness. You want to burn witches and heretics–you just call them Communists and Progressives and Liberals. Glenn, you and no doubt Wee Willy Skousen would contend: that’s not what we want at all. But that’s certainly the way Police Chief Willard Cleon Skousen ran Salt Lake City when he had his crack at a theocracy. Of course you don’t want a Christian Police State Glenn. You preach about the dangers of incrementalism but you and Skousen’s ghost are both apparently too stupid to realize that’s what every single Christian Nation in the history of the world has led to.
The US Constitution is not the product of a Right Wing think tank. It’s the result of hard-fighting, enlightened,
classical Liberals. Skousen’s analysis of the world’s political spectrum is the infantile, ethnocentric groaning of a myopic, egocentric, provincial paranoid who’s only ever looked as far as the next church spaghetti dinner for his understanding of either politics or religion. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, these are entirely subjective and conditional terms. A Conservative Russian is a flaming Marxist. This terminology has never been either precise or absolute. Without a context and a comprehensive, overlooking frame of reference they are as useless as anything else Cleon Skousen doesn’t quite get. Which is rather a lot. Really Glenn, don’t you have an inkling of discernment in you? What’s “Liberal” in Provo is “Conservative” in Minneapolis. What’s “Conservative” in Austin Texas is Leftist Propaganda in Orem Utah.
I’ve got news for you Glenn Beck, the louts who looted and trashed the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle weren’t from the Right. They were raving Lefties. They were self-professed Anarchists. Anarchy does not come from the Right by any known definition of Right. Police Chief Cleon Skousen was a Right Wing Zealot and he did not represent the face of Anarchy. It’s inane. Skousen argues in effect, that since the Right is always for law and order, as he clearly is, that at some point the absolute most law and order you can have is Anarchy.
Because he’s an ass.
More blatantly Glenn, you and Skousen argue that all the violence today, all the totalitarian, Nanny-State, repressive governmental stifling of basic human rights, religious and intellectual freedom, comes from the Left. In quaint, Hannity or Limbaugh-era terms: The Problem is Liberals you say. You point out example after example and grin smugly, laughing at anyone who doesn’t catch your brilliance—daring the world to challenge your empirical masterwork. But you’ve missed a pretty obvious point Glenn.
Those officious shitebites you keep indicting aren’t Liberals. There aren’t any Liberals any more. Chairman Mao said: sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. Well, it has. They fought the Establishment, they beat the Establishment, and now they ARE the Establishment. They rocked the vote, and now they’re not going to rock the boat, and they won’t let you rock it either. What was radical, revolutionary, and represented the product of allowing period “Liberals” to think freely and explore alternatives to the existing political and social structure, has now been codified, canonized, carved in stone and will be just as vigorously beaten into the captive citizenry as any other retrograde, reactionary, Conservative movement. Opposing ideologies will be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
The guys who politically rescued Mormonism in spite of itself in the early days were Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Whigs and Republicans just wanted to wipe Mormons out. The only totalitarian regime ever to infiltrate and rule in this great land was the Puritan government at Plymouth Colony. America’s Children of the archetypal ruling Christian bastard, John Calvin, made the Taliban look like amateurs.
Willard Cleon Skousen had it all arse-backwards. Don’t follow this buffoon’s intellectual dyslexia ‘round and ‘round until your powers of reason disappear into your own arsehole as well.
If you won’t believe me, if you won’t believe Joseph Smith, perhaps you’ll believe James Madison:
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries. [James Madison, 1803 Letter objecting to use of state land for churches.]
Now, I led with that statement because it sums up my point so well. However, it’s become fashionable these days by “Christian Nation” zealots to claim this quote is not actually one of Madison’s. It has been long attributed to him but its provenance is a bit murky or so they now claim. Whoever said it, it is perfectly phrased to express what Madison would no doubt have said himself. I imagine that because it so perfectly also discredits the Holy Conspiracy’s claim that the Founding Fathers never really meant to build what Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church and State, it would be handy for them if he hadn’t said it. I wonder however, why the Holy Conspiracy is so exercised to disprove the validity of this sentiment, when Madison clearly says essentially the same thing repeatedly in a host of other absolutely unquestionable documents:
During almost fifteen centuries, has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution….
–Page 106, Christianity and the Constitution.
Nothwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment
of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov’ & Religion neither can be duly supported…. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov’ will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together; [James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt]
The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. [James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, Dec 3, 1821]
We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. [James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Assemby of Virginia]
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. [James Madison, 1819, in Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State]
Or as George Washington said in 1796 in signing the Treaty of Tripoli:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or
tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” [Emphasis mine.]
Every single Christian Nation eventually rises from it’s own repeatedly brutal self-extermination attempts saying, well, that’s all behind us now, we’ve finally fixed the religion—and then evolves into the same violently repressive culture yet again. Over and over. That is not Our Father in Heaven’s plan for America.
What Cleon Skousen missed, what you’re missing now Glenn Beck, is that the 5000 Year Leap made by the Founding Fathers in 1776, was deliberately and carefully aimed as far from the direction of a Christian Nation as they could launch themselves. Now you and your Holy Conspirators want to jump back into the Christian historical pit of darkness. Enlightenment came to America in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
That’s the great Bait-and-Switch ploy you aren’t seeing Brother Beck.
That’s the Christian Cycle Glenn.
That’s Satan’s Plan.
Satan’s Plan.
Glenn.
Glenn Beck Part 3: ET Phone Home—Skousen Left a Callback
Glenn, Glenn, why persecuteth thou me?
Glenn, why do you weep out your passionate faith in Divine Providence when you have clearly set yourself about to thwart it? The God you claim to worship has struggled to make His will known through two-thousand years of faithful but incompetent imbeciles and spiritual jackasses of great loyalty but no common sense. The so-called “Christian” world has repressed, oppressed, hacked, tortured, excommunicated and annihilated itself back and forth with no sense of God at all, much less an understanding of the human condition and the physical universe. Through the generational writhings of this anti-intellectual, spiritual, social, and political cyclone of selfish, ignorant, human opinionating, the Great Architect of the Universe finally brought together just the right handful of truly enlightened souls, on the right continent, at the right time, and in the right circumstances, to help mankind write God’s pure will into human law. God overcame centuries of narrow-minded, dogmatic so-called “Christian” bigots and bullies, craftily slid past the Christian dumb-asses at the Constitutional Convention, and gave us the Divinely Inspired Constitution of the United States of America.
The Constitution guarantees all of God’s children what Mormons call, “Free Agency.” The Agency of Man is not a Christian concept. Free will is an illusion in Christian theology. Man can either be God’s agent or the devil’s agent. Man has no agency of his own in Christianity. No man is innocent until proven guilty, all men are born guilty and worthy only of death and hell. Unless they are “saved” and “born again” into the family of Christ, they are tools of the devil and have no part in a Christian Nation.
It really is that simple Glenn.
I’ve heard you stammering incredulously over it with Christian callers on the radio Glenn: No, Christians do not believe we are
all God’s children. You certainly aren’t one as a Mormon. That’s Christian theology. If you don’t even know that simple Christian precept you are truly a religious and intellectual toddler. You know just enough to be a danger to yourself and others-particularly to the church you claim to love. You can Bible-bash Christians all you want trying to sell your universal Mormon brotherhood of all mankind, but you’ll read it your way and they’ll just read it their way. Christians don’t actually read the Bible anyway, they just try to reconcile it against two-thousand years of Christian tradition. That’s why you can’t grin like some religious simpleton, and gleefully just round-up people of good character who fear God, link arms, and celebrate the Constitution as if we’re all brothers and sisters. That you believe it to be so, or that it is ultimately true, makes no difference to your Christian pals who haven’t allowed anyone making that claim walk out of the debate alive for almost two millennia.
Christians actually have no respect for the Constitution at all except insofar as it gives them what they imagine to be a right to ascendency over all other citizens. A lot of Christians for example, dug in at the Constitutional Convention to maintain that the Bible approves of slavery and thus their right to own human chattel had to be sustained by the Constitution as well. That wholly Christian argument took God another several American generations and hundreds of thousands of good Christian fatalities and brutal maimings on both sides of a bloody civil war to wipe clean the shite-sized smear the Christian Constitutional delegates insistently excreted onto the Sainted fabric of the Holy American Constitution.
The single, uniquely Christian contribution to the Constitution is slavery.
Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America. That’s as simple as I can make it for you Glenn. Christians want to “restore” the Constitution to their “Original Argument,” the one that puts Christians back in charge of the nation and allows them to rule directly out of the Bible just like Calvin did. Just like the Pilgrims did at Plymouth. The Constitution American Christians condescend to live under today was surreptitiously foisted upon them in 1787. It eventually allowed non-Christians to “take over.” Just like the Mormons did in Missouri and Illinois—simply by being allowed to vote Christians out of power so ‘non-Christians” could run their own lives. That’s what Christianity wants to “correct.” Christianity wants back the right to run your life for you Glenn. And it won’t be pretty for you if they get their way.
The legal code adopted in 1641 as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, reads as follows:
58. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to see the peace, ordinances and rule of Christ observed in every church according to his word. So it be done in a civill and not in an Ecclesiastical way.
59. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to deale with any Church member in a way of Civill Justice, notwithstanding any Church relation, offic or interest.
60. No church censure shall degrad or depose any man from any Civill dignitie, office, or Authoritie he shall have in commonwealth.
94. 1. If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.
2. If any man or woman be a witch, (that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit), They shall be put to death.
3. If any man shall Blaspheme the name of god, the father, Sonne, or Holie ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptous or high handed blasphemie, or shall curse god in the like manner he shall be put to death….
Page 33, Christianity and the Constitution, 1987, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids MI 49506
Christianity is lying to you Glenn. What Christianity really wants, as clearly exposed in Puritan legal code, is to give civil officers all power and authority to administer Church affairs and administer Church punishments. Your revisionist Christian Nation “historians” phrase it in a way that only points out that the Church is not allowed to enforce its will upon the citizenry. What they don’t point out is that in a Christian Nation, the civil government is given all power to do just that—the State in this Puritan, “Christian America” is empowered to interpret, enact, rule upon, and enforce, Christian, Biblical law, even over, above, or against the persons of or objections of Church officers. The Puritans had no concept of a pluralistic society or religious liberty. They just democratized religious oppression.
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, the “founders” of Mormonism were born into an ancient Christian tradition that every single one of them found backward, lacking in insight, and filled with reprehensible notions that they believed arose out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic nature of God and mankind’s relationship to Him. Long before Joseph Smith claimed to be seeing Heavenly visions and collaborating with Angelic visitors, his entire family was actively seeking more enlightened answers to questions they believed Christianity had been getting wrong for generations. They pondered these questions however, as mainstream Christians. They were familiar with the jargon, the history, the many failings, the irrational dogma of the Christian world. The Founding Fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America found themselves in the same condition.
When I refer to the “Founding Fathers,” I refer almost exclusively to those authors and delegates who had controlling input into the crafting of the Constitution itself. What the others thought is nearly irrelevant.Their ideas got redacted out of the nation. So, yes, a lot of “Christians” had input into the document. It was a document designed to rule a national majority of Christians. You could even say it arose out of a Christian environment. But its authors very specifically eliminated the several central and utterly fatal Christian theological and ideological concepts that had self-destructed every single authoritatively Christian government that had ever existed before. They repeatedly cited clear examples of the failures of Christian governments, and every bit as clearly argued against forming just another one like them.
The Founding Fathers believed, as did Joseph Smith, that it was Christian theology itself that inevitably turned on its governed masses, only to torment and destroy them.
Divine Providence, therefore, was working against the founding of a Christian Nation, not for it.
My dearest Brother Beck:
I come to minister, not to be ministered unto. I cannot help you if you will not first admit you have a problem. But I shall do my best Brother Beck, to teach you correct principles in spite of yourself, and in spite of the corrupting influence of your new Mormon conspiratorial-world-view-messiah, Willard Cleon Skousen. To do so I must risk seriously pissing off a couple of generations of sometimes high-ranking “Mormons” who once, or now still, have chosen to indulge Skousen’s uniquely “Mormon” but generally preposterous, political paranoia.
Glenn, you and your Skousenite compatriots have studied the words of the Founding Fathers as Mormons. Unlike the Founding Fathers or their political contemporaries like Smith, Young, Taylor, Roberts and the early Mormon deep-thinkers, you, Skousen, and his Wasatch Front benefactors of whatever Mormon rank, are the product of generations of theological, social and political inbreeding in an isolated valley, in the center of a great empty basin, as far from The United States of America as you all could get at the time. You translate Christian Enlightenment vernacular into Mormonese. You think Mormons are Christians. You think the stuff the Founding Fathers wrote into American canon therefore sounds like Christianity. This is because you are idiots. Simply put, you are ignorant. Your failed perspective has made the history and intentions of the Founding Fathers come out all wrong in your provincial Mormon heads.
Accept this in the spirit of love in which it is offered. If it enrages you enough to think about the possibility of your error, at least I will have done my job here. This is how the world sees you–this is the confused pondering you force every human on the planet to struggle through in order to even begin to understand what “Mormonism” is supposed to be all about. You are incapable of seeing it from where you hunker comfortably down there in your safe, cosey little valley. You have no insight or any sense of natural cynicism out of which you might even ever self-enlighten enough to pose the question that would advance the cause of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like a 5000 Year Leap. And this is the question: Is it worth it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the world has to first embrace the impassioned peripheral ranting and ramblings of the likes of Glenn Beck and Cleon Skousen, to gain access our the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?
The Constitution, the writings of the Founding Fathers, to an educated, intelligent person, actually sound like the conscientious, orderly work of Liberal, Enlightened Christians, Deists, Universalists, Masons, and Free Thinkers. That’s because they were. We can easily read these same heretical charges being spiritedly hurled against the authors of the Constitution from the “Orthodox” Christians of their day who vehemently opposed most of their best ideas.
The Founding Fathers sounded like Mormons. The Founding Fathers sounded like Joseph Smith when he talked about society and politics, and even religion to some extent. You and Cleon are right about that Glenn. That doesn’t make the Constitution Christian at all. It makes the Constitution about as far from “Orthodox” or “Historical” Christianity as those authoring it could make it, as they vigorously tried to shield its sacred prose from the fatal Christian pretexts that run-of-the-mill Presbyterians, Methodist, Baptists, Catholics, and other conventional “Christians” on the panel were trying to wedge between its hallowed lines.
Organized, “Historical” Christianity you must understand, is nothing whatsoever to do with anything Jesus ever had to say. Brother Glenn, all you happy ecumenical guys in your mystical Beckland think you can join hands in prayer for the nation, you think you can slap each other on the back like you’re even talking the same language, but you have nothing politically or theologically in common with most of your new “friends.” You imagine it’s all about being a good person, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
Dr. A.H. Barton, of the “Christian Jew Hour,” a national radio program once said:
“If all you’ve got is the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments, you’ve got nothing.”
For the benefit of the non-Christians and non-Mormons having a read, I’ll simply say that as fecked up as you think Mormonism might be, it’s never been as fecked up as this thing the world knows as “Christianity.” 
Joseph Smith’s message from God to Christianity in common terms was, you’re all fecked up. Even if you mean well, you’re still totally off the mark. Joseph Smith’s “restored” Gospel contrary to your apparent understanding, was in its day a radically Liberal one, and that’s why the Conservative Christian Establishment killed him. That’s what totalitarian “Christian” societies have always done to those who criticize them.
Joseph Smith preached a Gospel of moderation in all things. Friend Glenn, what you’re doing is nothing close to “moderate.” It’s frigging frenetic in it’s un-moderation. Christianity has not been inherently moderate at all through the ages. You’re just a case in point that proves me out. You’re assembling your own socio-political-religious nuclear reactor and nobody apparently told you about installing control rods—because you clearly don’t have any working for you. Nimrods yes, but no control rods.
Joseph Smith’s first official statement of faith was the “Wentworth Letter,” posted in a newspaper to explain basic Mormon beliefs. Mormons now call this “The 13 Articles of Faith.” The Articles pertinent to this treatise are:
10 We believe in the literal agathering of Israel and in the restoration of the bTen Tribes; that cZion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will deign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be erenewed and receive its fparadisiacal gglory.
11 We claim the aprivilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the bdictates of our own cconscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them dworship how, where, or what they may.
12 We believe in being asubject to bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the dlaw.
Glenn, you may want to refer back to these now and again, because this is Mormon canon.
Yes, we as Mormons believe a lot of Biblical stuff will be going on in Israel and the US in the Last Days. I know that’s one of your main fixations, but nobody is saying these days are them. Only you Glenn. And yes, we believe the Constitution is Divinely inspired, exactly as it is, warts and all. It can be fixed and polished as we go. That’s built into the document itself. But contrary to your implied belief, we do believe in supporting mortal governments as mortals, by mortals, for mortals. If Jesus is coming back to run the show He doesn’t need you or me to steal His thunder. He will let us know. He will let everyone know. Until then, feck off with the Armageddon talk Glenn. You missed the boat on that whole Mormon Survivalist Era. Stop trying to drag its sunken hulk back into port and re-float it. The Brethren aren’t even talking a “year’s supply” any more. It’s down to a 72 hour pack for emergency use. That’s just common sense, not preparing for imminent destruction of the universe. When the president of the church announces it’s time to pack up and move to Adam Ondi Ahman, then let’s all get excited. Till then chill out brother. Chill.
Joseph Smith also agreed with his political John the Baptist, Thomas Jefferson:
…It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
Brother Beck…Glenn, your entire fanaticism is driven by apocryphal bullshite from sources outside the LDS canon. You’re doing what I call: crapping on my religion. Most Mormons have the luxury of crapping all over my religion with their spooky Utah folk magic and pseudo-intellectual Pioneer Hillbilly gobbledygook in the privacy of the Wasatch Front where the non-Mormon population just rolls its eyes and ignores the silliness. Not so with you Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the Osmond Family of Apocalyptic Paranoia. Glenn Beck is crapping on my religion in front of an international fan base and a much larger growing base of hostile critics of Mormonism anyway, who’s rapiers of easy ridicule you sharpen daily.
I beg forgiveness for you Glenn. I beg pardon from God and mankind both. Glenn Beck is not what Mormonism is about. Cleon Skousen is not what Mormonism is all about, and a prophet of God made that an official declaration in 1979. Has nobody given you the message yet? I know in 1979 you were a stoned alcoholic, but sober up brother. Wake up and smell the 21st century. Mormonism is goofy, but not that goofy. Dangerously goofy.
Glenn, nothing personal, but have you ever wondered why God is striking you blind? What if every time you
read a Cleon Skousen passage the ungodliness of it burns away just a little bit more of your sight? Do you need to be struck dumb as well before you get the message? Mormonism is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The Constitution is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The gaggle of evangelical Christian zealots you’re assembling to “save” the Constitution only mean to “save” it from the non-Christians. Like you. They do not believe in Free Agency. They do not believe in an open pluralistic society–with the possible exception of tolerating the least offensive non-Christians as second-class citizens just out of charity. They’re only just enlightened enough to not try to achieve their goals through genocidal Crusades any more. Instead, they’re happy to employ the services of grandiose, self-deluded Quislings like you to reverse all the gains won by our Founding Fathers, and restore America to the Puritan Hellhole of Calvin’s Geneva.
Glenn, you may recall that Satan’s plan in Mormonism, is defined as the denial of choice. Free Agency is the ultimate right of all intelligent beings in Mormon theology. Man can choose to be good or bad. Man is also free to be neither and just waste his time. In Mormon theology, man is not inherently evil, but has won a place on this earth, to experience this learning laboratory, by already proving he has chosen to do good in a previous spiritual existence. That leaves us with stupid. Man is not born evil, man is born stupid. That means you too Glenn.
Because man is stupid and prone to imperfections and mistakes, and because in the presence of a Perfect God no mistakes can be tolerated, God created a lesser, physical reality in which man is free to manipulate objects, influence or lobby or organize his fellow beings, and debate concepts freely, without pissing off God because of man’s natural idiocy, constant screw-ups, generally annoying behavior, and bad judgment. In order for there to be choice however, there must be opposing choices, differing arguments, from which man can chose. So, back to Satan for that.
When this Divine program to advance our immature spiritual selves into a more godly mankind was presented to us all, Mormons believe Satan claimed he could bring all of us back to our Father in Heaven intact, having reached our highest potential with absolute certainty. He made this boast on two conditions: one, he had to have all the power and glory and get all the credit, and two, he needed to force us to do the right thing all the time. Well, God the Father, or Eloheim, said Lucifer’s plan sort of misses the point. Jesus, or Jehovah, said He’d be God’s humble agent, become our physical Creator, God the Father could have all the glory, and Jesus would take responsibility for the sin and error and evil that necessitated out of said Creation, because human failure was integral to allowing mankind the opportunity to grow. As the Creator, Jesus accepts upon Himself the sins of all mankind, and pays our debt to the Father so we might return to Him.
Contrary to popular belief, Mormons believe Jesus got the gig.
Stick with me Glenn, because this is hard doctrine, central, never been messed with, never been contested Mormon theology. You’ll find it in all the training manuals with the Correlation Committee’s stamp of approval. Not like the turd-filled tangential volumes you’ve apparently been perusing. And even just this introductory bit here Glenn, it ain’t Christianity. It’s absolutely foreign to Christianity. They killed Joseph Smith and attempted to annihilate his whole church for teaching it. In Mormonism, God guarantees you the right to choose your own path without either He or Satan compelling or threatening you with hell and damnation or bribing you with a cheap Grace salvation. That wouldn’t be a choice. That would be coercion. That would be Christianity.
The devil in Mormonism, is generally capable only of tempting man with the most subtle, spiritual or intellectual promptings. And man has to be a willing promptee. The devil can only get his way by working on mankind with these ephemeral urgings until man gives in, embraces the idea, and physically acts upon it. In Mormonism, Satan has no body, no authority, no power, and never will, and this mortal period is the only avenue of influence upon mankind or the physical universe he will ever have. In Mormonism, Satan won’t even inherit hell and rule over the damned—Cain gets that post, Cain has a body, made the first cut, served his time on earth, and though he screwed up his mortal chance at eternal glory, he still ranks over Satan, and as the first murderer and inventor of the concept of destroying others to get personal gain, Cain will receive a resurrected body as we all will, only to inherit the job of Evil Overlord of the Eternally Damned. According to Mormon theology, Satan rejected earth life in a big war over the salvation plan in Heaven, where Satan and a third of the Heavenly Host got kicked out of God’s program entirely. So, this earthly span we now enjoy is the devil’s only time to shine.
Satan claimed however, with this tiny bit of power over mankind, he’d rule the world. Now, that only works if you give Satan credit for it. If you don’t buy his boast, nothing happens. Satan can’t physically come after you. In fact Satan blowing his own horn until he appears to be invincible to mankind is one of his first manipulative tricks. Appearing as an Angel of Light is another. Glenn Beck should know that. His new favorite political prophet and insipid Mormon author had Lucifer as a ghost writer.
Lucifer’s greatest ploy is not the half-truth as is often claimed, but the just about a third share of truth. That means you’re eating the devil’s shite at a 2-1 ratio, about as high a level as he can shove that crap down your throat without you noticing it. And Glenn Beck buddy, you take your Satanic Shite with milk and cookies, so you just don’t have a clue what all you’re eating along with the yummy stuff.
Is the devil’s goal to lead you down to hell? No. That’s not even statistically possible, since in Mormonism, only a tiny minority of humanity ever gets sent to “Outer Darkness,” a rough equivalent of hell or damnation, where not Satan rules, but Cain, and only those who deny the Holy Ghost ever get to see what it’s like. All other sins are pardonable, and Christ doesn’t close the door on accepting Him as Savior when you snuff it. Mormons believe in universal physical salvation. Everybody gets resurrected. Everybody gets judged, and nearly all of us are going on to some sort of reward. Earth life itself is already a reward. And yes, if you never stumbled into Him on earth, you still can accept Christ as your Lord and Master beyond the veil and do OK for yourself.
Christianity believes that Satan was literally handed this world after Adam and Even fell. Christians believe our Father in Heaven went off in a huff and turned the universe or at least our little piece of it over to the Adversary. In Christianity, Satan is the god of this earth. Satan is the spiritual Father of all mankind. Satan is the defacto Creator of our corrupted human flesh through a devilish and filthy biological act. Nature’s God is Satan in Christian theology. Anything natural, anything man creates, including human offspring, is for the glory and posession of Satan and unworthy of God’s Majesty. Every living thing, animal or vegetable, the very stone and earth we walk upon, every egg, every sperm, is Satanically corrupted, and every fetus in the womb is heir to damnation. Now, I submit that by internalizing this fundamentally bleak and desperate world-view as its core belief, anything Jesus of Nazareth had to say about being nice to each other has little effect in most cases. Christianity finds itself making bleak and desperately opressive internal laws and then consistently rallies its forces to vigorously and violently export these laws in greater and greater circles of oppression. Why? It’s simple, even if you credit Christians with good intentions, they really believe you are going to suffer eternal torment if they do not convince, or force you to join them. And likewise, they really do believe that if you are not one of them, you are an agent of hell on earth and a danger to good rule and society.
In rather an opposite take on the matter, Mormons believe mortality is a gift from our Creator where we can learn, grow, know joy, and appreciate the sweet by tasting of the bitter—not grovel before an arbitrary God who slapped us together one weekend with some spit and clay while on an inexplicable and mysterious Creative Lark, where we’re damned from the get-go, where God randomly elects to send most of us to hell but decides to save a few of us for Himself according to His whims. Satan has no power to change this program. Indeed, like the Flood, or Sodom and Gomorrah, any time the world or a culture reaches the point where Satan has gained so much influence over mankind that mortal existence is no longer a fair and reasonable test bed for learning wrong from right, God cleans the slate and starts over. Thus, in spite of the devil’s best efforts, future generations continue to have the same opportunity to chose their own way in life.
Now, Glenn, on this latter point I think you may be getting far too anxious.
The Obama Administration is not by far the most decadent and ungodly society ever to disgrace the planet. Not until the US president is hosting gala orgies of sex and carnage, where conquered slave women are being raped to death by donkeys in public sports facilities should you start spouting that level of hyperbole. (Though in your younger days Glenn, I bet that just describes a typical weekend outing to Mexico.) The world has been in far worse shape brother. Far worse. We were able to choose our own destiny before Obama, and we will be able to choose our own destiny after Obama. It’s routine American politics baby. If I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure God will actively purify America all on His own as He has done before. It’s His job. Not yours Glenn. Not the job of the John Birch Society, Willy Skousen, or GBTV.
No, It’s the devil’s main goal in Mormon theology, to simply feck around and generally distress humanity as much as he can with while he still has a chance. And Glenn, he’s fecking with you. He’s having a ball. It’s the only fun he’s ever going to get. He knows he’s not going to bind many of us in chains—we already told him to piss off in a previous spiritual go-‘round. We all stood with Christ in pre-mortal battle against the forces of darkness just to get here. All Satan can do here and now is try to show God what a stupid idea that Free Agency thing is while he’s got a rightful place in the earthly arena. Who knows Brother Beck? You may indeed have a bona-fide call from God—but that just means the devil is going to make an extra effort to feck it up. He seems to be doing a good job of it so far.
Satan, the former light-bearing “Lucifer,” got the job of “Accuser of the Saints.” He got it because he’s the ultimate prick. That’s Satan. That’s who he is, what he does, and how he works. And he’s pricking you Glenn Beck.
Prick. Prick. Prick.
When Satan comes to destroy your soul and drag you down to hell, he seldom comes sporting horns, a pitch-fork and a pointy tail. Usually he comes wearing a pretty dress and singing a sweet song, looking something like Marie Osmond. I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. And other times he comes looking like your friendly old uncle Cleon with a kindly smile and a comically oversized nose.
Which brings me in earnest to Willard Cleon AKA “Klingon” Skousen. Skousen might well be the penultimate devilish prick. God help us. Why in heaven’s name Glenn, Brother Beck Sir, did you decide to dredge this inane fossil’s handiwork out of the literary dustbin? Why do you weep so profoundly at the scribblings of this half-demented, discredited, disowned Mormon political heretic? What demonic little elf sat on your shoulder and whispered: Let’s have another go at this crazy bastard…! Come on! Just roll this Skousen lunacy right in with your simpering, Chicken Little-prophetic-panic-attacks and you’ll pick up a whole new audience just waiting for a place to vent their pent-up, world-hating xenophobia…
Klingon Skousen is to Mormonism what that other insufferable prick Jean Cauvin is to Christianity. Only the combined life and works of Willy Skousen can rival the inexplicable Mormon participation in the slaughter of the Fancher party at Mountain Meadows for the shame and recrimination it has dumped upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even Skousen’s one-time comrade in Commie-hunting, Ezra Taft “ET” Benson, who boostered Skousen and his John Birch buddies in the early days of the Red Scare, got very silent about the whole topic by the time he became LDS church president, and fully sustained Spencer W Kimball’s official 1979 disassociation of the LDS church with anything or anyone Skousenite.
Both Benson and Skousen got the nicknames I’m using from a large portion of the Mormon faithful who thought these two had just wandered into the planet from outer space when they first started openly talking conspiratorial politics in John Bircheese at formal LDS religious venues.
Cleon Skousen passed away in 2006 at the age of 93. In his last years he was something of a pariah, though he’d been bolstered in his career as this last era’s preeminent LDS BS merchant by two or three high-ranking pals in church leadership. One of them, Thomas S Monson, current LDS president claimed at his funeral service:
“Everyone he spoke to, everyone he taught, is closer to Christ than before they met Cleon Skousen.”
http://www.ldsliberty.org/an-open-letter-to-detractors-of-w-cleon-skousen-and-his-works/
I would counter this by saying it is exactly the warm commentary expected from an old friend who dates back to an era where a lot of would-be LDS church theology was cobbled together by unofficial guesswork in a
convoluted jumble of speculation and extrapolation by a bunch of intermountain goobers generations away from any original or authoritative sources, through a process that amounted to just sitting around the general store with a hayseed in your mouth and kicking wild-arsed ideas around. I’m sure Willard Skousen was a gentle, friendly guy who argued his case humbly and calmly. They said the same thing about John Calvin—until you crossed him. Then he tended to haul you into a show-trial, declared you either a traitor or a heretic–it amounted to the same thing–pronounced you invariably guilty, and then preferred to cut off your head. If you really annoyed him, he took your life’s work, used it to light a bonfire, and chained you up on a post next to it and slowly roasted you to death in a public square over the course of hours, so your friends and neighbors can all smell your slowly burning flesh and hear your agonizing screams while you beg for mercy, as an example of why you shouldn’t argue with John Calvin.
I would further suggest that for every person who talked to Cleon Skousen that found him helpful in building a testimony of Christ, a good ten or more were instantly repulsed and concluded that if accepting Willard Klingon Skousen as an inspired prophet of God, and Donny Osmond as a musical genius is required by Jesus Christ for salvation, then hell looks pretty good by comparison. And worse yet, Skousen multiplied his political and intellectually repulsive capabilities exponentially with every new convert he recruited to his paranoid cult of personality, and through every insanely conspiratorial political or “historical” book he published with implied approval of “The Brethren.” Skousen’s underground Mormon network of xenophobes spread the paranoid dread of unknown conspirators like Amway’s pyramid scheme foisted over-priced household products on the nation, till soon everyone had a garage full of the stuff. And oddly enough, it was all the same people.
As Donny Osmond did not recruit “Mormons,” but rather “Osmondos,” so too did Cleon Skousen never bring a single Latter-day Saint into the church, he only ever converted earnest seekers of Jesus Christ into “Skousenites.”
I would submit that Cleon Skousen was the single most divisive character in Mormon history. Having absolutely no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever, Cleon Skousen alienated more otherwise worthy segments of the national and world populations, from even exploring Jesus Christ and His Restored Church, for purely political and philosophical reasons, than any secret, Satanic, Communist conspiracy could have ever schemed to deter from baptism, or a thousand Whores of Babylon could have ever hoped to lead away from God’s light through carnal, sensual and devilish charms.
The real truth is, the John Birch Society that Cleon Skousen and his benefactors in the LDS hierarchy so loved was actually started by KGB sleeper agent and dynastically-wealthy, multi-national grape juice magnate Robert Welch in 1958, to serve as a disinformation bureau that would ultimately discredit the American Conservative Movement by depicting it as the integral product of a fanatical core of self-destructive paranoid schizophrenics. Russia was also confident that once American Christian patriots had been infected with this seed of xenophobia, they would quickly duplicate the hysteria that resulted in most of the town being prosecuted or executed as witches, in colonial Salem. The Kremlin first got the idea from the histrionic self-nobbling antics of Senator Eugene McCarthy a few years earlier. By the end of his delusional episode, McCarthy was so unpopular, and the anti-Communist movement was so humiliated by his example, that the KGB insisted that though it would take a convincingly Capitalistic stooge like Welch and a little prodding, they would still find many willing dupes in the US, eager to take up the cause of paranoia, and continue the job of negating any legitimate American Conservative agenda. Soviet think-tanks felt by this means the very heart of American politics could be rendered divided and the citizenry made mistrustful of both fellow Americans and the government itself. The probable outcome of this effort, the Soviet project heads maintained, would be that America would gradually grow more and more politically and socially crippled, indecisive, and directionless. On the world stage, the formerly All-Powerful United States of America would become totally ineffectual due to its incessant internal in-fighting and radically opposed idealogical and political partisanship.
Cleon Skousen was a sometime professor at BYU, from 1951-55, to 1967-1978. That’s his only claim to any authority at all. For the record, the preceding paragraph is total BS, but it’s as authoritative as anything Cleon Skousen ever wrote. It’s just a matter of finding patrons who are willing to believe it. After that, it’s all about peer pressure.
I ran into my first batch of Skousenites as a student at BYU while Cleon was in his last two years there. They’re still fumigating the Religion Department of his stink, and they can’t burn his political books fast enough to keep them from resurfacing on campus—thanks to Glenn fecking Beck. Glenn, pal, don’t you know you’re riding the crest of a wave that crashed all it’s most gnarly surfers against the hot red walls of Zion’s Canyon in about 1985 and left them flopping there on the ground, stunned and unable to save themselves from their own stupidity. They’re all still hiding there waiting for the mushroom clouds. And then along came Glenn Beck…
Thanks Glenn.
At least the fallen LDS apostle, the late Paul Dunn confined his fairy-tales to heroic fantasies about his imaginary baseball career on teams he never played with. Dunn’s books were swiftly purged from LDS libraries when he was essentially given a permanent suspension of duties for telling tall tales to missionaries about his pitching exploits. (Faith promoting lies yes…but harmless mostly.) Unlike the ignominious, permanent disappearance of Dunn, Glenn Beck now resurrects the damaged Cleon Skousen, everyone’s favorite long dead and irrelevant, schizophrenic Mormon hack, and elevates his once-cultic revisionist Christian classic to Best-Seller status overnight. Beck’s a late-coming player in a game of 8-ball that was essentially over in the Mormon church a generation ago. The question to ponder, is whether Beck is a mark or whether he’s actually the hustler. If the latter is true, then he’s got a lot in common with Cleon Skousen.
Skousen’s strictly religious contributions to Mormonism are too sophomoric to go into at length. Only the fact that the rank-and-file Mormon is such a bewildered and ignorant student of any religion at all, Christianity, world faiths, or even their own, explains why any Mormon would be fascinated by the circuitous ponderings of Klingon Skousen. Some of his postulates include the speculation that the co-eternal spirits (us) who lived with God in the pre-mortal existence, could have voted God out of His position—that God would cease to be God if we stopped supporting Him.
Skousenites routinely sat around in their little BYU think tanks or priesthood quorums worldwide, claiming the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus via cloning, or that Jesus was incapable of dying unless He wanted to because he was a self-healing, alien-human hybrid. (God-human hybrid at least.) They occupied themselves pondering the most obtuse claimed “historical” propositions of ancient Mormon leaders out of private period journals or those records popularly attributed to Brigham Young, Joseph Smith or other early leaders, like the enigmatic assertion that Adam was born “of an earth, but not this earth.” When they finally cloned Dolly the famous Scottish Sheep and lab experiment, they went off on a cloning theory binge. They pretended to have “proven” the Virgin Birth via cloning. When they found out cloning only produced females from females, well, that was already one theory floating around John Birch circles anyway. Mormons however, went on to artificial insemination via beaming Divine DNA directly inside Mary’s womb as a better explanation. Skousen and his disciples spread this entire concept of digging out “higher truths” from students and missionaries to stakes and missions and converts all over the globe via his active political and religious fan base.
This is weird shite even for Utah Mormons. It’s flipping blasphemy. The notion that we even need to investigate and understand all the fine points of Celestial reproduction is spiritual pornography. Even his authoritative friend ET Benson said so quietly, as president of the church. Suffice it to say, none of Skousen’s works, none of his theories have ever been endorsed by LDS authority nor advanced into official instructional or commentary materials. More obviously, Skousen was never called to any significant church ecclesiastical office even in his brightest days. But you see, nobody wants to shut down kindly old Brother Cleon, and you know some of his theories sound pretty OK, so you have to give him credit for what he got right don’t you?
That’s how Satan works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYvgplF0LUI
http://lehislibrary.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/cleon-skousens-intelligence-theory-of-atonement/
http://reperiendi.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/the-atonement-by-cleon-skousen/
To be blunt, the Skousen era at BYU, and the Church Educational System and Seminary programs that he
contaminated in the process, were an embarrassment to future generations. My wife, who was born and raised in Salt Lake, recalls one BYU religion professor proposing that the “earth had wings” and the ten lost tribes were out living on these “wings.” No. I am not kidding. Other BYU Skousen-era conjectures deduced that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene, and the wedding He attended in Cana where He performed His first miracles was His own. It was further proposed that Christ had more than one wife, and most likely children. You can just watch The DaVinci Code for the rest. That’s the sort of crap Skousenites thought about all the time. Although I personally know it to be shite, my point is not whether any of this may or may not be correct. The point is it’s pointless. Why even go there then?
It’s hard enough to sell Golden Plates, cabin-going Angels, a non-Trinitarian Godhead and Joseph Smith translating ancient papyrus he bought from a travelling peddler through a shiny rock in the bottom of a hat. Why add yet another layer of improbable-sounding, entirely apocryphal Utah-Mormon pioneer folklore between the core of the faith and the potential convert? It’s plenty entertaining for the bored-arsed Valley Mormons who are forced to sit through one, two, three hours of the same damned meeting discussing the same damned stuff every other day of the week. Yeah, you gotta have something “new” to talk about eventually. But it’s counter-productive as hell in a missionary sense.
I do have to confess that some of Skousen’s political ideology I find fairly sound and productive on its face. But I could also say that Adolph Hitler restored the German economy, built the autobahn, made the trains run on time and designed some pretty snappy outfits. That whole taking over Europe and killing off all the Jews and genetically inferior races thing, well, maybe that went too far. But generally, Hitler had some good ideas about nation building. Likewise, even if 90% of Skousen’s masterwork, The 5000 Year Leap for instance, is reasonable theory, it’s still the 10% of his most central elements that are totally evil that negate anything else he has to say. To wit: Brother Skousen, America is not a Christian Nation, and the Constitution was not pulled out of the Bible’s arse. The Constitution is the work of truly enlightened men, not Christians.
And before you cry foul, Skousen and Adolph had a lot in common:
“The Naked Capitalist” [one of Skousen’s political masterpieces allegedly based upon the work Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley] does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen. [Emphasis mine.}
"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."
In-between his stints at BYU, Skousen served as police chief of Salt Lake City. He ultimately got sacked from the post in 1960 by a very Conservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, who called him “an incipient Hitler” who “ran the [SLC] police department like the Gestapo. Lee also called him an outright liar:
“Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”
Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in Alberta, Canada. He also had relatives in Juarez Colony Mexico. Colonia Juarez, What you won’t note unless you’re one of the Utah boys, is that these are the two places polygamist Mormon families fleeing the Christian anti-polygamy Crusade in Utah escaped to after the takeover of the territory by Federal troops. They were both out of US jurisdiction. Frankly, those Mormon colonies were even more isolated and more culturally provincial and literally inbred than even the Utah Saints ended up being. And apparently they were so isolated from the reason for their isolation, that Cleon Skousen never understood that his people were banished to these outposts to escape the very Christian Nation he wrote about so glowingly in all of his books.
Skousen moved to California at age 10, grew up, served a Mormon mission in England and Ireland, went to junior college, moved to Washington DC to work in a New Deal farm agency, and then worked for the FBI, gaining a law degree while he was at it. Before his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Salt Lake City, his position at the FBI was little more than a middling file clerk without any particular clearance that would expose him to his oft-claimed “inside” Commie conspiracy information. The FBI in fact, in later years, maintained a file on him that grew to be two-thousand pages long and cited him as a danger to the nation and an encumbrance to the Bureau’s anti-Communist efforts. Ironically, once he hit Salt Lake City, he easily landed his job as police chief based on this FBI “experience,” and even after failing this police post spectacularly, he still parlayed his FBI “credentials” into an ultra-Right Wing anti-Communist empire, because the hard-core pious Mormon Conservative Zealots of Salt Lake City claimed he’d only been fired because he caught the mayor playing poker with some influential friends. Ah, the “insiders” took him down. Poor Willy.
A conspiracy nut is born.
Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file. “Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,” says Lazar.
It was during his Calvin-like iron-fisted reign as police chief over Salt Lake City that Willy Skousen became a born-again anti-Communist. This was initially fueled by the McCarthy hearings, the efforts of the John Birch Society, and the resulting Red Menace panic that was extremely high in the quaint, provincial minds of the Utah Mormon community. It was in this period he wrote his first classic, The Naked Communist. He slipped LDS church president David O McKay a copy, which the latter wholeheartedly praised.
In 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he claimed that there were known communists working in the State Department. He went to Salt Lake City next. McCarthy was caught up in a media whirlwind that fanned the anti-communist flames. TheTydings committee was formed. The Democractic Majority that authored the Tydings report called McCarthy’s claims a “fraud and a hoax.” Some Republicans called the report treason.
Joseph McCarthy was dead by 1957, but McCarthyism lived on. Within Mormonism, Cleon Skousen was its hero.
…
Two other minor points of note. First, Ezra Taft Benson was the Mormon Prophet from 1985-1994. He was named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943, and served in Eisenhower’s cabinet, with the permission of David O McKay. Ezra Taft Benson was a strong supporter of the John Birch Society. Second, “The Naked Communist” was first published by Publisher’s Press, which was then run by Thomas S. Monson, who is the Mormon Prophet today. (The Mormon conservative website mentions this here).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon
Another pertinent note is that Monson published Skousen’s first book through his own private publishing firm because President Wilkinson of BYU had initially entertained the idea of having Skousen set up a panel to compose a text on Communism for the school’s curriculum. Wilkinson scrapped the whole notion of incorporating any of Skousen’s Communist “expertise” into official BYU academic material when he saw what it actually looked like in print. Apparently Wilkinson had only humored Skousen’s fixation on the “Imminent World Communist Threat” on the recommendation of LDS church president David O McKay. Skousen’s own account of this is comically transparent—he headed a committee of actual scholars who had no interest in exploring his paranoid, conspiratorial babblings. They and Wilkinson eventually palmed the whole project off onto Skousen exclusively, who feverishly worked on it for two years out of their hair. Then Wilkinson blew off the finished product unceremoniously, saying his faculty wouldn’t support it—thus dodging any BYU affiliation with Skousen’s rabid, mad-dog Red-Baiting, while still having satisfied his chairman of the board, president McKay, that he had given it the “old college try.” Skousen completed The Naked Communist as a stand-alone work and in light of Wilkinson’s refusal and probably on the urging again of McKay, Skousen raised some funds for the presswork, Monson picked up the property and published it privately.
http://www.nothingwavering.org/post/16472/2009-11-16/cleon-skousen.html
In 1962 LDS General Conference, McKay recommended that members of the Church avail themselves of Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, declaring:
“I admonish everybody to read that excellent book of [former FBI agent and then-Salt Lake City Police] Chief Skousen’s.”
(David O. McKay, “Preach the Word,” Improvement Era, 62 [December 1959], p. 912, quoted in D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997], p. 82)
Given this sort of endorsement, Skousen became the darling of the Birch-hosted American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Skousen founded a group called the All-American Society, in addition to his other speaking efforts. Skousen accused all manner of top administration officials with treason and eventually incorporated most of the period government into his claims of Communist corruption. He claimed to have gained this insight from deep FBI contacts.
The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.”
…
When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional [anti]communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”
But you don’t have to believe me Glenn, because BYU once again now has been forced to deal with the stigma of Cleon the Klingon Skousen, thanks to you:
PROVO, Utah — Glenn Beck’s radio show draws roughly 8 million listeners a day.
W. Cleon Skousen gave nearly 15,000 lectures and wrote close to 40 books during his lifetime.
But just because those two, politically conservative LDS voices are some of the loudest, it doesn’t mean they speak for the entire conservative community, several BYU professors said during a panel discussion titled, “Glenn Beck, Cleon Skousen and LDS Conservatism.”
“One of the fallacies about our political culture is that we’ve allowed Cleon Skousen and those on the right to dominate LDS political writing and to suggest that that’s all there is,” said BYU political science professor Richard Davis, “even though that is clearly not the case.”
The discussion organized by BYU’s Tocqueville Project included three BYU professors and Paul Skousen, the son of the late, prolific political writer who was formerly best known for his best-selling book “The Naked Communist.”
However, Skousen has gained renewed interest since Fox News pundit Beck began touting Skousen’s book “The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Principles of Freedom 101.”
“It’s easy for me to see why (Beck) would have picked up on Cleon Skousen’s book and found it inspiring,” Davis said. “It fit in with his own performance.”And that’s a lot of what Beck does — perform, the professors said.
“Most of the books of Beck’s I’ve picked up — are like his manic, ADHD television personality,” said BYU political science professor Ralph Hancock. “He’s just throwing stuff out there. They’re not meant to be read as discursive arguments. They’re just thrown out there to try to entertain people who would rather be Twittering or playing video games.”
Hancock said he agrees with some points made by Beck and Skousen but overall finds their argume
nts lacking in substance and scholarly research.
“I find in both a trace of anti-intellectualism,” Hancock said. “My interest is to help connect a certain LDS conservative impulse or mood with a more deeply grounded intellectual conservatism. We can’t enter the political field with the argument that all the bad, but smart people think X, but we good dumb people think Y.”
Hancock told students that if they are serious about conservatism, they, and he, need to “study diligently to increase our confidence that our intense feelings are common sense — and can be rationally articulated.”
Paul Skousen took the criticisms in stride and said his dad’s entire life was focused on studying and asking tough questions…. “He was trying to provoke people’s thinking,” he said. “Dad’s invitation was, ‘If someone can do better, please do, but until then, this is what I’ve been able to do.’”
Paul Skousen said his father knew Beck was pushing his book but only watched Beck’s show once or twice before he died.
“Were Dad here today, I think he would enjoy visiting with Glenn Beck,” Skousen said. “His counsel would be, ‘You got to give us some more answers.’”
Hancock offered several scholarly books where those answers could be found.
http://www.mormontimes.com/article/6690/BYU-profs-Glenn-Beck-doesnt-speak-for-all-Mormons
I guess you can see why BYU, “The Lord’s University,” wanted nothing to do with Cleon Skousen’s “brilliant” political rants, and basically still doesn’t want anything to do with the man. For the record, I didn’t want Cleon Skousen to pull any more answers out of his backside. It’s not that he wasn’t intellectual enough, it’s that he was wrong. It’s that he apparently just jumped to half-baked, paranoid conclusions, pointed fingers of conspiracy randomly at convenient targets, and made stuff up.
The following isn’t Skousen, but it’s a good sample of what W Cleon Skousen’s twisted ramblings have lead the so-called “Conservative” moment into. This is a little tract I’ve hung onto from EJ Blackstone, a once popular local Christian conspiracy nut, big-time Bircher, and God only knows what other Right Wing causes he’s affiliated with at this point. In this tract from the Carter era, he says the “illegal” Godless, secular humanist government in Washington has seized America and is acting as the proxy American Politburo, rendering the nation just another slave state of the Soviet Union:
“There are three Supreme Court decisions that essentially declare the U.S. a Christian nation, and the Trinity Decision is only one of them. The Congress has enacted laws that correlates exactly with Marx’s ten points in the Communist Manifesto. This starts with a personal income tax, and moves through a central banking system, redistribution of the wealth, and the abolishment of the Church. The Communists have divided the nation [America] into 10 sub states, and already built concentration camps in three. Each camp holds up to 50,000 inmates, and thousands of Christians who’ve exposed the plot have already been sent there, or been killed.”
Well, I guess Jimmy Carter blew his chance or something. All the Carter administration did was screw things up and wreck the economy. That’s what happens when you vote for a humble Christian peanut farmer and fair carpenter to do a man’s job. No Soviet roundups of Christians that I recall though. I think Carter would have been rounding himself up in one of those.
I don’t know what happened to EJ. He used to skulk around church fellowship halls arranging secret informational meetings about an imminent Apocalypse. Then he just sort of faded out of the local scene in the mid-1990’s. Maybe “they” got him. Maybe he’s in one of those camps. Or maybe he got the secret signal and he’s in a bunker, living on “food insurance” in full communications blackout, still waiting for the Russian takeover. Moscow better get on the ball. I don’t think he had much more than a year’s supply. That’s all Skousen said he’d need—and that came straight from God.
Or maybe the doctors just revoked Ej’s day-pass.
Unfortunately for Klingon Skousen and his Right Wing friends, the whole Berlin Wall coming down thing in 1989 put a large vacant spot in the center of their conspiratorial nut-job pantheon of scary villains. Don’t worry Glenn. As you well know, Cleon finds plenty more out there for us to fear.
I’ll get to those after I rest my typing fingers.
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/08/mormon-bircher-cleon-skousen-was-mitt.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_289504316
Glenn Beck Part 2: White Horse Rising
Like a mighty army moves the church of God; brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod. We are not divided, all one body we, one in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
Glenn Beck is in the business of predicting the End of the World. Glenn Beck is looking for that “Epic Battle,” he
keeps alluding to, or Armageddon as the Bible calls it—the ultimate battle of good and evil. Glenn Beck has been sucked into his personal seer-stone and now lives deeply enthralled in his newfound Mormon Apocalyptic Wonderland. It may all be new and glorious to Beck, but the rest of us Mormon idiots suffered through the same shtick some thirty or forty years ago. It included a World Commie domino effect that fell on its face, a Soviet Empire that crapped out, a US economy that collapsed, the price of gold and silver skyrocketing. I even worked a while running a concentrating table in a gold refining installation in West Valley Utah around 1984, where we all carted around five-gallon buckets of gold-sparkling black sands and guarded our paydirt by sauntering around the shop packing heat on our hips. The world was going to end that year too as I recall. Nothing much came of it.
What ended instead was the LDS church membership of rather a lot of Glenn Beck-like “Christian Patriots” who backed some ex-Special Forces borderline paranoid named Bo Gritz for president, on the “Restore America to its Constitutional Principles” platform of the short-lived Populist Party. This party became associated with the Posse Commitatus and Militia Movements and attracted far Right elements like David Duke, former KKK notable who disavowed this past Klan allegiance and tried to mainstream his White Supremist Klan base into a functional political action committee along with a host of other tag-ons with no particular qualifications, like rich Okie, Ross “The Boss” Perot. When Gritz got exposed as a BS artist, and dropped his political aspirations because of reprehensible associates like Duke, and organizations like the Michigan Militia, who’s member Tim McVeigh later blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, many of the Mormons and Jack-Mormons who did not follow Gritz to his own survivalist base, “Almost Heaven,” in southern Idaho, ended up founding a survivalist community near Cedar City Utah. They’re still waiting there for the mushroom clouds with their gold and guns and tins of beans, and probably tuning in Glenn Beck from their bunkers waiting for the signal to be given.
Glenn Beck wants to take us there again. It’s back to the bunker for everyone. Reset. Reset. Reset. Jargon. Jargon. Imply Imply. Allude Allude. Beckism Beckism Beckism. Coin Copyrightable Terminology…Market Market Market. It all just means the Sky is Falling. Wait till he’s free from Fox. You’ll see some real freaky preaching then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Gritz
http://www.hydeparkmedia.com/gritz.html
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/gritz.asp?xpicked=2&item=5
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/29/michigan-militia-group-preparing-anti-christ-web-site-says/
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.asp?xpicked=4&item=19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Militia
http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/10-best-places-to-survive-in-america
All of these Apocalyptic, Christian America groups, like the Christian Front, who marched in American streets in support of Hitler at the beginning of World War II, have a Christian patriotic theme and focus around a world conspiracy out to destroy the United States. They all claim the nation is soon facing Armageddon, the Last Battle for Good over Evil.
Survivalism mind you, is basically Glenn Beck’s central marketing venture now. Clearly the first priority for any of the Christian Patriot or Christian America groups he fraternizes with is to survive the coming crisis—whatever that may be. They all know It’s coming soon. Whatever it is. And you better be ready for it.
http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/
Sure, Glenn Beck does his research and in that respect he’s not so much an extremist as he is a prophet of the blatantly obvious. But there’s always something churning desperately in the subtext with Beck. Glenn Beck a few weeks back said we’re at the start of 121 days of the most important chapter in the history of the world. Glenn Beck has a huge rally scheduled to save Israel venued on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This he rushed into production safely before Roshashona 2011. I don’t know why it’s always around that holiday but they sure love to plug that date into their calendar of world endings. Beck’s 121 day count is in the same ballpark as all the others. But of course, Glenn Beck doesn’t know what, for sure, if anything is happening when put to the light of scrutiny, so he’s off the “false prophet” charge and free to scoff and mock others who dare set dates.
I get the feeling that Glenn Beck is only able to intimate and hint about something “big” he’s working on, because at any given moment he’s probably still pulling it out of his own arse. But, there’s only a certain strain of crap that gets pulled out of the average Mormon arse, because they’re all part of a system that feeds them on a particular diet of very specific prophetic desperation. This gets digested, works its way through the individual’s system, and emerges as a the same familial feces over and over again through the generations. And every generation, some self-ordained Mormon visionary barely out of his Gospel training pants gets fascinated playing in his own prophetic poo and starts flinging it all over the rest of us.
Glenn Beck is a babe in the woods. He’s missing the “oops…now I’m just being a jackass” chip that shuts the brain down when it goes completely daffy. He means well but he’s fatally naïve. Beck daily warns how Lenin used students, intellectuals, artists and social revolutionaries to pull off the Russian Revolution, and when that was secure, Beck cautions us sternly that Lenin purged all these revolutionaries and installed the Communist Party with Lenin himself as the sole dictator of Russian politics. What Glenn Beck obviously doesn’t see, is that the Christian Nation movement he’s trying to rally from its 1980′s deathbed will do the same thing to him.
Glenn Beck, simply put, is neither one in hope nor doctrine with the Christian Right, the Patriot Movement, the evangelicals, the Silent Majority, or whatever else you want to call his growing flock of Christian political comrades. Glenn Beck is doing nothing new in the Christian Patriot game, he’s just a Mormon so he’s more organized and adept at running “programs” than previous Christian-only efforts. His religious ethos is more inclusive as well.
Nevertheless, Glenn Beck will be the first guy out on the street when his own American Crusade liberates his New Jerusalem from the heathen infidels. His Christian comrades-in-arms think he is one. On some level what he’s engaged in amounts almost to self-hate, like a Jew collaborating with the NAZIs to ferret out his brothers and sisters so they can be rounded up and sent to the furnaces.
People look at Glenn Beck and ask, how can both he and Harry Reid be Mormons?
All Mormons actually started out supporting the Democrat Party. The Republicans founded their party upon two main planks: the elimination of the “twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery.” Until the whole polygamy issue came up well into the Utah period, the Democrats were the only party who thought Mormons were mostly harmless, very industrious colonizers, a great block of votes to win in any case, and thus worthy of at least some political protection.
Originally, Mormon communities held all things in common, and when that failed, Mormons still used a systematically communal approach to building, buying, apportioning land and other temporal and governmental matters. Beck however, seems unaware of this near-socialist Mormon heritage or the church’s historical attachment to a Democrat Party that at least at one point was half-conducive to the notion of letting the Mormons found their own state, make their own laws, and live their own religion free of Federal interventions.
So, when I ask my “Still Small Voice” what’s really hauling Glenn Beck’s eschatological wagon so speedily down the road to Doomsday, a whisper comes back in the night saying, it’s three big horses, a red one, a black one, and a white one. A little impression comes to me that Glenn Beck has become indulged in the perennially re-surfacing tradition of what its Mormon proponents like to call the “White Horse Prophecy.” Beck doesn’t specifically quote any this twisted basket’s payload of horsepucky scraped off the barn floor of LDS history. I can smell it on him though. He’s embraced the stink of it if not the literal word of it.
The White Horse Prophecy itself, the centerpiece of a sub-Mormon folk religion, is a “revelation”—as they who believe in it claim—alleged to have been given to Joseph Smith in 1843. It wasn’t written down for a decade, and is based upon the anecdotal memories of two elderly Saints who claim to have heard Smith utter it off-the-cuff one day in his front yard. In this “revelation,” Smith allegedly prophesies that the US Constitution will hang by a thread in the Last Days, but the “boys from the mountain” as it is often colorfully paraphrased in boastful Utah re-tellings, will come riding to the rescue and save it.
The White Horse Prophecy is easily dismissed as grandiose, bunker-mentality-driven braggadocio on its face. Utah had the US Army headed out to subdue Mormonism at the time. It was also a very convenient “memory” that surfaced in time to bolster the Mormon settlers’ notion that they’d made the right choice in heading West, and that America was still God’s Chosen Nation, in spite of the fact that its government and half its citizenry had been trying to kill them all and stamp out their religion from the first day Joseph Smith came out of the trees as a callow youth and said Christianity was all messed up.
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=utah+war&safe=active
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War
http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/u/UTAHWAR.html
LDS president Brigham Young led Mormonism west after the assassination of Joseph Smith. He picked up the subject of the White Horse Prophecy, and reinforced its central theme, In an Independence Day celebration speech in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on July 4, 1854:
“Will the Constitution be destroyed? No: it will be held inviolate by this people; and, as Joseph Smith said, ‘The time will come when the destiny of the nation will hang upon a single thread. At that critical juncture, this people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction.’ It will be so.”
http://www.reliefmine.com/articles/prophecy/94-the-white-horse-prophecy
http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2008/11/beck-hatch-constitution-hanging-by.html
President John Taylor, who succeeded Brigham Young, while speaking on Sunday afternoon 31 August 1879 in Logan Utah, expressed similar sentiments:
“…The day is not far distant when this nation will be shaken from centre to circumference. And now
, you may write it down, any of you, and I will prophesy it in the name of God. And then will be fulfilled that prediction to be found in one of the revelations given through the Prophet Joseph Smith. Those who will not take up their sword to fight against their neighbor must needs flee to Zion for safety. And they will come, saying, we do not know anything of the principles of your religion, but we perceive that you are an honest community; you administer justice and righteousness, and we want to live with you and receive the protection of your laws, but as for your religion we will talk about that some other time. Will we protect such people? Yes, all honorable men. When the people shall have torn to shreds the Constitution of the United States the Elders of Israel will be found holding it up to the nations of the earth and proclaiming liberty and equal rights to all men, and extending the hand of fellowship to the oppressed of all nations. This is part of the programme, and as long as we do what is right and fear God, he will help us and stand by us under all circumstances.”
On 25 March, 1839, Joseph Smith, while imprisoned in horrific conditions on ostensibly false charges by a deputized lynch-mob in Liberty Jail, wrote:
“The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner; it is to all those who are privileged with the sweets of its liberty, like the cooling shades and refreshing waters of a great rock in a thirsty and weary land. It is like a great tree under whose branches men from every clime can be shielded from the burning rays of the sun. . . .”
As far as the Mormon loyalty to the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution goes, this is what I call, “Hard Doctrine.” It’s not now nor has it ever been in doubt, it is central and essential to the whole religious orientation of Mormonism. I could cite numerous references supporting this notion from a multitude of LDS presidents over the years. But there are also some more specific elements in the White Horse Prophecy that have always been highly dubious. In the words of Joseph Fielding Smith as an Apostle of the LDS Church, in October Conference of 1918:
“I have discovered that people have copies of a purported vision by the Prophet Joseph Smith given in Nauvoo, and some people are circulating this supposed vision, or revelation, or conversation which the prophet is reported to have held with a number of individuals in the city of Nauvoo. I want to say to you, my brethren and sisters, that if you understand the Church articles and covenants, if you will read the scriptures and become familiar with those things which are recorded in the revelations from the Lord, it will not be necessary for you to ask any questions in regard to the authenticity or otherwise of any purported revelation, vision, or manifestation that proceeds out of darkness, concocted in some corner, surreptitiously presented, and not coming through the proper channels of the Church…”
Joseph Fielding Smith incidentally, went on to become LDS church president. In addition to his authority on the matter, on this occasion, he was immediately followed by his father, Joseph F. Smith, who actually was president of the church at the time, and his father was even more blunt in his dismissal of the White Horse Prophesy:
“The ridiculous story about the “red horse,” and “the black horse,” and “the white horse,” and a lot of trash that has been circulated about and printed and sent around as a great revelation given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, is a matter that was gotten up, I understand, some ten years after the death of the Prophet Joseph Smith, by two of our brethren who put together some broken sentences from the Prophet that they may have heard from time to time, and formulated this so-called revelation out of it, and it was never spoken by the prophet in the manner in which they have put it forth. It is simply false; that is all there is to it.
These sorts of official condemnations not withstanding, Mormon conspiracy buffs stick to the White Horse Prophecy like flies propelling themselves eagerly into a pot of honey. Or, more accurately, like flies to a pile of shite, because most of them lay eggs in it and keep hatching brood after maggoty brood of self-created pests ever buzzing around it. The current evolution of the LDS White Horse subculture festered up during the last forty years, starting with the Ezra Taft Benson-era Mormon John Birch Society Generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
John Birch was an American GI killed just after WWII by Chinese Communists. Birch is purported to be the first casualty of “World Communism.” After the death of infamous Communist witch-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy in 1957, a hard-core McCarthyite from Indiana named Bill Welch founded John Birch’s namesake society in 1958 to continue hunting out commies wherever they may be found and throttle the Red Menace. In most areas, by the 1970’s, Birch elements had broken into separate wings because the Roman Catholics found they were being badmouthed behind their backs between the Born-Again evangelicals and the Mormons–both of whom tended to rate the Roman Pope as the anti-Christ and their Holy Mother Church as the “Whore of Babylon.”
The evangelical or just plain “Christian” faction broke free of the whole John Birch thing toward the late 70’s, and let the Birch Mormons quarrel with the Birch Catholics. “World Communism” essentially collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1989. By then, Christian Armageddonist and evangelical Rapturists were booking their own shows from church hall to church hall across the nation and were freely publishing books and making films and videos on their own, unencumbered by having to be diplomatic in their Last Days scenarios because of Mormons or Jews or Masons or Catholics who might be at a Birch meeting.
Instead of disbanding, slapping one-another on the back shouting, “Mission accomplished,” as the Berlin Wall came down, the John Birch Society decided to keep making money instead. It found a new series of “One World Government” related conspiracies to pander to its already paranoid membership based upon the “Insiders,” a muddled pantheon of capitalists and aristocrats and privileged classes like the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Royal Families of England and a few other countries, the Committee of Three Hundred, and so forth, who the Society now claimed had been the real enemy all along. In short, the John birch Society became a conspiracy nut magnet.
The Mormon chapters of the John Birch Society however, became a Mormon conspiracy nut magnet. In Utah, It became difficult to delineate the difference between a Mormon priesthood meeting and a chapter meeting of the John Birch Society. And Mormon conspiracy nuts brought with them pet Mormon conspiracies that were unique to the Utah pioneer bunker experience.
The Christians, and evangelicals in particular who remained in the John Birch Society helped move its main
conspiracy centers around nefarious plots by the United Nations and FEMA to round all Christians up into 50 concentration camps they claimed were already built, one in every state, headquartered in the then being built new automated luggage centre at the Denver Airport. There they would either be forced to accept the “Mark of the Beast,” which was to be a barcode tattoo and set of implanted transmitters connected to the World Central Computer, or they would be killed. (Not kidding.) As the Birch Society moved into the 1990’s, Mormons would have been just tickled to death to explore all of these emerging Christian Birch conspiracies, but, Mormons weren’t the targets of this sinister secret government in the Christian narratives, they were part of it. Along with the Jews and the Masons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-hvPJPTi4
As bizarre as professional cult-escaper/exposer Bill Schnobelen’s claims have been, in the 1990’s, he has to
be credited with being one of the most effective Christian evangelists of doom to fully inject anti-Mormonism into the whole pastiche of Christian xenophobic conspiracy theories. Christian conspiracy nuts were so willing and eager to incorporate anti-Mormonism into their end-of-the-World paranoia, that they lapped up anything this repeatedly debunked fraud had to say. They did so on his word alone, claiming to have been 
a secret-ultra-high-ranking kingpin in the Masons, the Illuminati, Wicca, a Druidic High Priest and a practicing vampire. He also claimed he was also a Mormon for five years—which of course, means he had complete access to all the Mormon “secrets.” According to Schnobelen, one of these secrets is a duplicate Oval Office in the Washington DC LDS temple with powerful transmitters and receivers in the temple spires designed to manage the Mormon Empire when the Mitt Romney takeover of America comes. These communication towers are so powerful they disrupt local communications and endanger air traffic overhead so that planes no longer fly over it. Schnobelen can reveal these great sorts of plots against humanity, apparently because death-oath-bound, Satanic, World Domination cults like the Mormons, the Illuminati, Masons and Druids, just hand hyper-secret knowledge to anyone who joins up and hangs out a while. These unholy secret orders also don’t apparently do anything but make idle threats when some self-important dickweed trips around the planet exposing these “secrets” to the whole world, and cashing in on the resulting Christian panic.
http://fanaticforjesus.blogspot.com/2011/03/bill-schnoebelen-and-mormons-temple-of.html
http://www.ronpaulwarroom.com/?p=890
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread337402/pg1
Going into the New World Order and a new century, Mormon John Birchers, unable to play in the evangelical sandbox, leapt gleefully back into their High Priest Groups at the local ward, and re-invigorated their long-time friend, the White Horse Prophecy. They incorporated it into a complex matrix of all the best conspiracies of the world—removing any anti-Mormon elements as they came to them. Now, most of these world-class conspiracy theories were originated by Protestant “Christians” and link everything bad in the world to Jews and Masons, with a shot or two at Roman Catholics and/or the Knights Templar, who again, are purported to be the progenitors of the Masonic orders—or at least some lines of them. The latest combination of these elements has become a popular film and book sensation known as the Da Vinci Code.
http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thedavincicode/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry
http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
http://www.templarhistory.com/
The Davinci Code’s author and the related theatrical feature film’s director openly confess that it’s all a load of BS. Even though it ruthlessly invents and distorts history and craps all over the Roman Catholic faith, they claim it’s only meant for entertainment and they mean no harm by it. But conspiracy jerks all over the world read it and watch it as documented fact.
Mormons have trouble buying into the secret society hysteria on a couple of levels. First of all, Christians have been saying that Mormons are themselves a dangerous secret society for generations. Also, Mormons love Jews
, in fact, they led the world in Jew-loving before the Christian Zionists ever realized Jews were blood kin to Jesus and blessed by God. Mormons were Jew-lovers before Jew-loving became fashionable. In a Mormon secret-conspiracy mill, the “World Jewish Banking Conspiracy” which is a central staple of these sorts of One World Government theories, isn’t really going to gain any traction. Sure, there’s a World Banking Conspiracy the Mormon buffs would say—but you can’t hang that just on the Jews. Also, Joseph Smith was a Master Mason. Anti-Masonic conspiracies always link to Mormonism in the Christian conspiratorial mythology. A lot of the Founding Fathers were Masons as well, and the Founding Fathers incorporated a lot of Masonic philosophy if not theology into the US Constitution. Mormons love both the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. They see Masonic participation in the founding of the nation and the writing of the Constitution as enlightenment, not a Satanic plot to enslave American Christians. It would be hard to sell a Mormon who knew his stuff, on the American Revolution as a dark conspiracy effected by the Illuminati that was not intended to establish a haven for intellectual and religious liberty, but really intended to establish a Godless “One World Government.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89SB59DT34
http://www.masonicinfo.com/illuminati.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati
I don’t know what the Roman Catholics Birch fans did when the Russian balloon deflated instead of “going up,” because they met in their secret John Birch cells just like Lenin’s Marxist cells, but again, they too became increasingly annoyed with finding themselves connected negatively to John Birch conspiratorial dogma. Eventually however, without a universally hated pinko in every union and a commie under every bed to focus on, the John Birch Society became increasingly annoying or at least limited and unfulfilling to its Mormon constituency.
As the John Birchers were battling out the end of the twentieth century, yet 
another conspiratorial nut-branch spun off along libertarian or liberal lines during this period, based upon the example of one Lynden LaRouche. These tended to make the US Government itself the villain in its scenarios, starting with the Kennedy assassination, and of course culminating now in the “911 Truther” movement and related cabals who became convinced GW Bush was Hitler incarnate and the US would be a Police State before the end of his rule. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, became an even easier target for their theories, since he promised to un-do all the Bush era “Homeland Defense” measures and instead upgraded, renewed them, invaded Pakistan, and started lobbing bombs and missiles at Muammar Khadafi
The LaRouche spin-offs tend to be non-religious and often agnostic or atheistic, they don’t figure into the Glenn Beck story except as occasional foils. For all intents and purposes however, they look exactly like the evangelical or Conservative, Religious Right conspiracy nuts, it’s just that they don’t want to put Jesus in the Oval Office. They are a type and shadow, an illustration of how these paranoid groups are capable of sticking their fingers to the conspiratorial wind, and often quickly shift their players and culprits from year-to-year, election-to-election, adapting to any incoming political regime or world theater players, to perpetuate their deluded theories no matter how many times their “well-proven” scenarios don’t pan out, or their “irrefutable evidence” is debunked. These too, play the “Patriot Game,” but in fact, they don’t seem to want a Congress or House or Oval Office at all, or anyone in government at any level telling them what to do at all. And there’s probably a few Mormons or other “religious” folks mixed in there with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
http://www.infowars.com/alexjones.html
As we came to the end of 21st century there were a lot of patriotic, God-fearing conspiracy nuts looking for a new conspiracy nut messiah. They were also looking for some new conspiracies that didn’t personally implicate themselves. They didn’t want to have to believe anything too far-out because they’d been burned several times before on that score, and they didn’t want to hang out with lawless, dope-smoking libertarians.
Enter Glenn Beck. Enter the mainstreaming of Mormon eschatology. Enter the evil Progressives, the enemy for the new generation of conspiracy freaks. Enter “Spooky Guy,” George Soros. Who wouldn’t couldn’t help but be enthralled in the machinations of this Godless, manipulative, multi-billionaire who helped NAZI’s harvest Jewish property as a kid? Soros is a lifelong fan of Progressive Fascism who currently speaks openly about his wishes to bring forth a World Socialist Utopia. If an ecumenical, patriotic culture of conspiracy freaks is to succeed, it will need great villains, common to all sides, and Soros certainly fits that bill.
Beck is also in the process of resuscitating the Russian Federation as a credible threat to world and domestic security. “Crazy Ivan” is too good a foe to lose for Apocalyptic purposes. The Chinese just seem to be making sneakers cheaper than anyone else. The North Koreans would like to be menacing, but they still can’t lob anything over our back fence. And then there’s the Muslims. Beck has a much harder time than many others in his field, in admitting that there is some sort of “sane” Islam. He doesn’t seem very aware that the Salt Lake church has been chumming up to rich Muslims like the Kashogi family for ages, and teaches that the “Children of Ishmael” are also protected by God and heirs to the blessings of Father Abraham.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi
Glenn Beck, for all his great ability to read books, apparently hasn’t yet read any on the Crusades. I know he’s 
read up on American Christians kicking the crap out of Native Americans and Mormons, but in all his lecturing on the evils of Islam, he’s never once mentioned the Mother of all Wars, so far as the middle east is concerned, the “liberation” of Jerusalem, the rape, murder and pillage of Palestine that we still call the “First Crusade.”
The word “Crusade” literally means carrying the cross of Jesus ahead of you in battle as you slaughter, steal and destroy everything and everyone falling before your mighty Christian army, just to teach the infidel how mighty Jesus is. Christians still use the word like it was a good thing.
The first Crusade of 1095 or so, was conducted exactly like a “Jihad” to recapture the Holy Land. The first batch of knights to head out of European “civilization” to rescue the birthplace of Jesus from the heathens, ran short on their hastily gathered food and other stores in what is now Germany, and decided just to plunder and murder the local Jewish villages instead. They never made it to the Crusade. It gets worse from there, but most Christians still maintain that God commanded the English and European nobles to commit this bloody mayhem because the Muslims and Jews had it coming.
http://christendomsfolly.xanga.com/677903221/item/
Even a casual researching of what actually went on during the Crusades should convince the most faithful Christian that these Crusaders were not very Christ-like at all. Those Christia
n Privateers who managed to find Palestine, rode into Jerusalem and slaughtered every Muslim man there, and many of the women and children. Then they seized the surrounding lands and booty from the surviving locals, divided it all amongst themselves and set up little fiefdoms.
The Palestinian natives all looked the same to the Crusaders, with those towels on their heads of course. So the Crusaders just killed everyone who looked brown and they couldn’t understand–including the Christian guardians who’d been servicing and protecting the holy Christian sites and shrines for hundreds of years. And of course they killed off a lot of Jews while they were at it. Killing Jews wherever and whenever they popped up was just standard operating procedure for a Christian Knight. Where do you think the KKK got their pattern from?
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/firstcrusade/Overview/Overview.htm
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/medieval/history/highmiddle/bernard.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/the-first-crusade.htm
Beyond Glenn Beck’s fairly sane analysis of current political and social movements around the world, and his ability to reasonably identify and prove who the bad players are in all of it–he always leaves you with the impression that there’s something he’s holding back because the world just can’t handle the truth. I wouldn’t say Glenn Beck keeps a consulting a copy of the White Horse Prophecy just off-camera, pinned to the wall with yarn strings connecting its passages to notes, news clippings, and photographs just like on CSI. But when there’s a horse in the room with you, the room smells horsey.
The White Horse Prophecy was allegedly delivered by Joseph Smith on May 6, 1843, following a review of the 
Nauvoo Legion, the large and well-ordered defense force of the newly founded Mormon base city in Illinois. Two rank-and-file Mormon members, Edwin Rushton and Theodore Turley are the source of this story.
At this review of his troops, Joseph Smith is said to have taken a glass of water in the heat of the day, raised it to his troops and said, “I drink to you a toast to the overthrow of the mobocrats.” The next morning a critic of the church dropped by Smith’s house and commenced cursing him loudly and profusely for making that toast. Smith ordered him out, and hearing this commotion from the street, Turley and Rushdon approached the Mormon prophet to console him over this rough treatment. Smith allegedly told them, “We will have worse things to see; our persecutors will have all the mobbings they want. Don’t wish them any harm. For when you see their sufferings you will shed bitter tears for them.” Edwin Rushton then records:
While this conversation was going on we stood by his south wicket gate in a triangle. Turning to me he said: “I want to tell you something. I will speak a parable like unto John the Revelator. You will go to the Rocky Mountains. And you will be a great and mighty people, established there, which I will call the ‘White Horse of Peace and Safety.’ When the Prophet said you will see it, I asked him, “Where will you be at that time?” He said, “I shall never go there. Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two ‘to defend you’ to throw out the worst part of the laws, so they will not hurt much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, they will treat you like strangers and aliens, and they will not give you your rights but will govern you with strangers and commissioners; you will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed; it will hang by a thread, as it were, as fine as the finest silk fiber.”
…”The time will come when the banks in every nation will fail and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasures. These places will be the White Horse and England’s vaults.”
It rambles on a while and talks about the two Popes reuniting, gathering Jews from the world nations, keeping Russia in check, putting down the Turks and liberating the Holy Land, (Israel, not Utah) and so forth. It uses a white horse to represent the Mormon’s Zion State Smith allegedly envisioned and a couple of other horses figure in there as well, but it’s anybody’s guess what they represent. This Apocryphal vision isn’t unique. There are several similar documents and allegedly prophetic stories along the Mormon trail. They are sometimes called “folk doctrines,” or “faith promoting rumors.” Alleged witnesses and journal-keepers throughout the history of Mormonism have repeatedly jotted down thousands of random ponderings allegedly from Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and other Mormon “authorities.” These records have been religiously (pun intended) maintained but most of them never canonized or even officially debated.
The Problem with Glenn Beck is, first of all, he thinks Mormons are Christians. Worse yet, he thinks Mormons and Christians have a common interest in preserving America as a nation founded upon the freedom to worship God according t
o the conscience of every individual citizen. Glenn Beck thinks American Christians understand that the United States is a pluralistic society, a Constitutional Republic founded on the free agency of man and the common belief in Nature’s God.
Glenn Beck is a Useful Idiot of the Holy Conspiracy.
In fact the Holy Conspiracy was eagerly promoting a Common Law theory called “jury nullification,” in its heyday ten or twenty years ago, which means any jurist on a case who believes the law in question is ungodly, has the Christian duty to vote the accused innocent, thus nullifying the law. Conversely, even if the Christian jurist knows the law or charges are spurious, but the accused has it coming from God, then it is good Christian stewardship to vote “guilty” regardless of the evidence. Specifically this was addressed to those “Christian Patriots” in the day, who were accused of bombing abortion clinics, caught refusing to pay income tax to an evil federal government, and so forth. It’s exactly the sort of “Christian” stewardship that let Joseph Smith’s killers got off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/nyregion/26jury.html?_r=1
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/084742-2011-02-28-jury-nullification-advocate-is-indicted.htm
You can’t blame Glenn Beck for being confused about his non-Christian status. Some years back the Mormon church engaged in a multi-multi-million dollar missionary and media effort to convince the world (and themselves) that Mormons were Christians like any other Christian. (At the time Beck may have been too drunk to notice.) In most Christian circles this attempt at re-branding gained Mormonism almost nothing however.
Mormon authorities often make public proclamations actually bolstering the belief that America is fundamentally Christian by Law and Constitution. This is precisely the legal premise upon which Mormonism has been beaten and driven into second-class citizenship for nearly two centuries. Dallin Oaks, one of Mormonism’s most respected academics, former president of BYU, and currently an apostle in the Council of Twelve, quoting former Mormon president, David O. McKay said:
“Recent rulings of the Supreme Court would have all reference to a Creator eliminated from our public schools and public offices. [1962 NY vs. State Board of Regents] “It is a sad day when the Supreme Court of the United States would discourage all reference in our schools to the influence of the phrase ‘divine providence’ as used by our founders of the Declaration of Independence. “Evidently the Supreme Court misinterprets the true meaning of the First Amendment, and are now leading a Christian nation down the road to atheism.”
July 1990 Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, SLC Utah.
Glenn Beck is certainly ignorant of his non-Christian status and indeed a lot of modern American Christians clearly find Glenn Beck’s message quite attractive. This is only due to reciprocal ignorance on the part of the average Christian. They’re often as blissfully unaware of the fundamental doctrines of “Historic” Christianity as Glenn Beck is.
There are no “unalienable rights” granted to man by their Creator in the “Historical” Christian scheme of things. There is only “God’s Will,” and everything that exists is subject to it. The only choice mankind has is to obey “God’s Will” or burn in hell. Those doomed to hell have no business in a “Christian Nation” at all, much less voting on anything.
The Founding Fathers on the other hand, believed that an educated population could rule itself in a just and upright manner, without King or Clergy giving it binding orders. Almost all of organized Christianity to date, has always maintained that man is fundamentally incapable of ruling himself, and that whenever man is given license to choose his own fate, make his own rules, use his own judgment, he will invariably choose to serve his natural evil desires, seek his True Father, his earthly Lord and Master, Satan.
In orthodox Christianity, the closer man thinks he comes to understanding Truth, the farther he can be sure he is getting from it. If it strikes man as good, right, true and logical, you can be sure it is Satan’s program.
Unlike the Founding Fathers, or Mormons for that matter, Christianity holds the core belief that good is only good because God says it’s good. If God said bad was good, it would be. If God says kill babies then baby killing is good. In Mormonism by contrast, truth exists in its own sphere. Truth is truth because it inherently is. God does good because it’s inherently right and God is inherently good. In Mormonism, baby killing is just wrong because it’s wrong to take innocent life. It’s what Mormons call an “Eternal Principle” and not even God can alter the truth of it.
In Christianity, God defines what’s good and what’s evil. God defines what’s true and what isn’t–and this via an incomprehensibly alien mind that humanity could never make sense of anyway so blind obedience is the only proper response to anything “God” (or his agents in the clergy usually…) commands. The Ten Commandments are only true principles because God says they are. There is no intrinsic right or wrong in any of it. Man cannot fall back on his own feeble wisdom and do what he considers to be right as he sees fit—because only God can tell man what that is, so again, even making the right choice without God is wrong. Even thinking you can choose the right without God’s direction is literally damned arrogance.
The concept of human choice doesn’t even exist in “Historic” Christianity. In Mormonism, or the Deist/Masonically-influenced US Constitution, the “Free Agency” of man is the whole point of mortal existence. It’s a training ground whereby mankind makes choices and learns right from wrong until knowing and loving good while dodging and shunning evil becomes an inherent part of man’s character. In Christianity, choice is an illusion.
“You can be a slave of Jesus, or a slave of the devil. Is there any other choice? No there isn’t. Freedom is a myth but you can choose what you’re going to be a slave to, and what you’re going to be free from.”
Father Al Lauer, “Daily Bread,” 15 February, 1989.
“Historic” Christians have always understood that they are saved no matter what, but on the other hand, even
the good done by heathens and infidels, or heretics like Mormons, are counted as evil by God and they’ll burn in hell anyway. Christians who kill or repress or brutalize their religious or political opponents at worst will realize how wrong they were at some point in the Final Judgment. But as I say, the Final Judgment is already known and the “Christians” win. More importantly, “Historic” Christianity has always maintained that man is inherently evil, not, as our Founding Fathers maintained, “Innocent until proven guilty.”
And still, Glenn Beck does not catch on to these basic differences between his view of God and Government, and that of rather a large part of his throng of public followers. Glenn Beck is preaching Mormon ideology to the same people who burned his pioneer Mormon forefathers out of Missouri, murdered his founding prophet Joseph Smith in Illinois, and raped, pillaged, starved, robbed, chased, and slaughtered his early American “Saints” out of the United States entirely, into Mexican Territory. And when it looked like the Mormons weren’t going to die off all on their own in this desolate wilderness, the forefathers of his modern 
Christian supporters sent out an army of destruction, followed by troupes of Baptist, Methodist, and other “Christian” forces of “civilization,” to tyrannize and browbeat his forefathers through cannon, ball, and legislative pen. The great-great-grandparents of those who now buy tickets to his “inspiring” shows voted to socially and politically persecute, and eventually legislate the Mormon church and all its members into poverty and second-class citizenship, until they were legally denied any power of self-determination and stripped of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights of franchise.
In only one variant of the American Christian war against Mormonism, this is how the good Christians of Missouri explained their attempted Mormon genocide in 1833:
We, the undersigned, citizens of Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society, in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our county, styling themselves ‘Mormons;’ and intending, as we do, to rid our society, ‘peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,’ and believing as we do, that the arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one, against the evils which are now inflicted upon us, and seem to be increasing, by the said religious sect, deem it expedient, and of the highest importance, to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose….
It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics, or knaves, (for one or the other they undoubtably are) made their first appearance amongst us, and pretended as they did, and now do, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the Most High God; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder working miracles wrought by the inspired Apostles and Prophets of old.
…More than a year since it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to sew dissensions and raise seditions amongst them….
In a late number of the Star, published in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become “Mormons,” and remove and settle among us. This exhibits them in still more odious colors…for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to,to see that the introduction of such a caste amongst us would corrupt our blacks, and instigate them to blood shed.
They openly blaspheme the Most High God and cast contempt on His holy religion by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues, by direct inspiration and by divers pretenses derogatory to God and religion, and to the utter subversion of human reason.
…
Under such a state of things, even our beautiful county would cease to be a desirable residence, and our situation intolerable. We therefore agree that after timely warning, and receiving an adequate compensation for what little property they cannot take with them, they refuse to leave us in peace, as they found us we agree to use such means as may be sufficient to remove them, and to that end we each pledge to each other our bodily powers, our lives, fortunes and sacred honors. [Emphasis added.]
History of the Church, Volume One , pages 374-375.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMissouri_Executive_Order_44
The Mormons called this the “Mob Manifesto.” The old Christian settlers called this the “Secret Constitution.” the State of Missouri called it “Executive Order #44.” There are still Christians willing to openly argue that it was a reasonable reaction to what they considered some very annoying Mormon neighbors. Christians believe
they have a Constitutional right to not be annoyed by non-Christians. I mean this literally, and so do they.
Glenn Beck is fond of using the phrase: “We pledge our lives, fortunes and sacred honors,” or variations thereof, in rallying his mobs of fans into swearing oaths of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. Apparently he’s not bright enough to realize this phrase was the same phrase used to pledge his own destruction, forsworn generations ago by the very Christians he now seeks to rally for what he thinks is the common good of the nation.
Brannon Howse, founder of Worldview Weekend, which organizes Christian conferences, before Beck’s Washington DC rally in 2011 warned:
“The Apostle Paul warns Christians against uniting with unbelievers in spiritual endeavors. While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck’s conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck.”
David Shedlock, writer with the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts commented on the same subject:
“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God. Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.”
Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in a recent NPR interview said that Glenn Beck’s Mormonism “is not a Christian faith,” though he accepted that president Obama’s liberal Christianity which supported abortion and a host of other ills, was orthodox. Land suggested that, “Perhaps the most charitable way for an evangelical Christian to look at Mormonism is to look at Mormonism as the fourth Abrahamic faith.”
Time’s Amy Sullivan notes in a recent column by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that Moore dismisses Beck for preaching a “watered down theology that’s short on the gospel.”
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/01/04/glenn-beck-and-the-new-evangelical-ecumenism/
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0810/Baptists_vs_Fox_News_at_prayer.html
Like the evangelicals today who openly criticize Glenn Beck for doing what they wish they could be as successful at doing, the Secret Christian Constitution was authored in Jackson County Missouri, in 1833 by a committee of Christian clergymen. This tribunal was headed by one Reverend Benton Pixley, Baptist, with clergy associates named, Bogart, who was a Methodist and captain in the state militia, as well as Reverends Isaac McCoy, Finnis Ewing, Fitzhugh, Kavanaugh, Lovelady, Likens, Hunter and others, all of whom persistently published anti-Mormon inflammatory tracts and corresponded to local and Eastern papers with libelous abandon against Mormonism.
Pixley was referred to by the Mormons as “a black rod in the hand of Satan.” He had been sent to “civilize” (Christianize) the heathen of the West. He told the Indians that the Mormons were devils who would destroy them. He told the “Old Settlers” that the Mormons were in league with the “savages” and the slaves, and were trying to drive them from their rightful place.
Not to be outdone by Benton Pixley and the Baptists, Reverend Finnis Ewing, head of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, is credited with publishing the definitive anti-Mormon credo:
“The Mormons are the common enemies of mankind, and ought to be destroyed.”
The signers of the Secret Constitution first secured the support of most of the local elected officials and officers of the law. They had long been inciting anti-Mormon incidents under various conspiratorial rationale, and the local rabble was just busting to panic. The situation came to a head on election day in the town of Gallatin. First, a group of Mormons had to box their way into a public polling place that had been blocked by a Christian mob organized by a Christian candidate who claimed they would take over the county if they were allowed to vote. The Christians retreated from the fisticuffs, led by their candidate, and swore to return with firearms. The Mormons came back with their own and shooting commenced.
The Mormons appealed for state protection and the governor sent troops out. Guess what: the troops didn’t protect the Mormons at all. They joined forces with the freelance mobs rallied by Christian ministers and local politicians who had besieged the nearby Mormon settlement of DeWitt, and was trying to starve out its population. One state detachment led by the noble Christian minister, Captain or “Reverend” Bogart, raided the village of Haun’s Mill, trapped most of its men in a blacksmith’s shed, and picked them off through the wide cracks in its log sides. Sardius Smith was a child of ten when a militiaman named William Reynolds found him cowering under the bellows after the battle, and blew off the top of his head saying, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have been a Mormon.” Reynolds bragged about watching the boy’s lengthy death struggle at local grog shops for years afterward. In the same battle, Captain Bogart demanded the surrender of an old man, took the old man’s gun and killed him with his own weapon, and then laughed gleefully as he hacked the body to shreds with a large knife. He and others hacked several of the dead and dying to pieces as well, and left them as an example for those who later had to come claim the dead.
But Reverend Bogart wasn’t so victorious against armed and prepared Mormon defenders. The esteemed Methodist minister had taken his mob-militia through the countryside and began raiding Mormon settlements as he came upon them. It didn’t take long for the Mormons to organize a counterforce, and when Mormons began very effectively taking his troops down right and left, Bogart sent a dispatch to Missouri’s governor Boggs, claiming that the whole county was being overrun by a lawless, marauding Mormon army. In return for winning the election, Lilburn W. Boggs issued a “fire at will” order of extermination.
Armed with the Governor’s authorization, Reverend Bogart fulfilled the aims of Pixley’s Secret Constitution in the rape and pillage of Far West, where most of Mormondom had surrendered for protection to regular state troops. But by the time all was said and done however, the regulars were so infiltrated with Bogart’s mob-militia and other adventurous types, that as the last weapon was grounded, a “whoop” went out from the soldiery around them. The entire, penned-in and now unarmed Mormon population was set upon and openly brutalized for weeks under the approving eyes of at least twenty Christian clergymen who held court with the militia over the fate of their conquests. Women were strapped to benches and raped to death in full public view while Christian clergymen debated the “heretical crimes” of Joseph Smith within earshot of the screaming.
Smith himself was chained in a public square in the winter rain while Christian militiamen cracked open the skull of a companion so they could challenge Smith to heal him. Smith was forced to watch the brains of his friend slowly ooze out beside him in the storm as they faded into death.
(See Essentials of Church History, or any Mormon history or the Missouri legislative record for the details. Don’t bother looking in Christian retellings, they omit the raping and pillaging and burning and looting and murder and mayhem.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilburn_Boggs
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/findingaids/miscMormonRecords.asp?rec=eo
It’s a recurring theme, I know. I just can’t express the irony of Beck’s affiliation with these sorts of “Christian America” zealots clearly enough in words: “Historic” Christians have no substantial respect for, or belief in the Constitution, its officers and legal tradition, nor the democratic process in any form, except insofar as these continue in their estimation to coincide with “Biblical” or traditional Christian doctrines and objectives:
“When you’ve got a religious system that denies the divinity of Jesus Christ and the power of the shed blood of Jesus on the cross, then you’d better believe I’m prepared to go to war!”
Bob Larson, “Talk Back,” 8 May, 1991.
“It [Christianity] is a belief that completely molds the lives of those who believe in it.”
James Kennedy, “Truths That Transform,” 15 May, 1991.
Now, apart from complaints about Glenn Beck stirring up the Old Christian Settler’s slaves into rebellion—Beck has received essentially the same criticisms from modern Christian leaders that were used by period Christian clergies in the dawn of Mormonism to kill Joseph Smith and his fellow Saints off. So, on top of dealing with the crushing antagonism of the Godless Secular Humanist/Commie/Progressive social engineers he makes his specific political targets, Beck should also be well aware that he will never be a member of the Christian club. Not even on a political level. The Bible is Christian politics.
It’s not a question of Beck’s intelligence that makes him such an idiot. It’s a question of discernment and not 
having any natural, healthy cynicism. Mormons in general have neither discernment nor any instinctive skepticism. Glenn Beck has less healthy wariness than most, because there’s nothing more self-righteous or self-absorbed than a reformed hooker. In Beck’s case, make that a Mormon alcoholic. And having conquered that, he now is compelled to make his life worth something, something BIG. SOON. Something. Tune in tomorrow to hear what’s coming next…
While I believe he’s earnest and does his homework, frankly, he’s basically the guy you read about in 1 Corinthians 4:10, making himself a “fool for Christ.” It’s admirable in a way, but embarrassing to watch. Glenn Beck knows that politics is just war by other means. How can he not see that the Christian political soldier marches on to war to enforce this ideology:
“You just look around and see everything that is just and right and good has come at the influence of evangelical Christians!… The unbelievers will be cast into the Lake of Fire. I did not write that. I could not. But the Lord did.”
David Briese, Southwest Radio Church, 14 June, 1991.
Bob Shmitgal makes plain the inescapably negative Christian psyche better than I ever could:
“The humanist idea that I have the goodness in me to become what God created me to be is leading people into hell. Within us there is no good thing without Christ. Even the good things we do without Christ are evil.”
26 November, 1988, “Looking Up.”
The Trinity Decision was a petty US Supreme Court ruling back in 1892, that allowed a local church to import a minister and sidestep some federal protectionist immigration labor laws in doing so. It’s a waste of time to fully delineate the case but the Christian Nation movement is simply in love with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Trinity_v._United_States
http://candst.tripod.com/holytrin.htm
Dr. James Kennedy, and his “Truths That Transform,” on-air ministry led the last century’s Christian Nation movement’s advance into unceasing public Christian intimidation of “non-Christians.” On 26 September, 1988, at the peak of the Last Temptation of Christ mania, he wrapped up his condemnation of the “pagans” responsible for said motion picture, by citing the “Trinity Decision’s” alleged Christening of America as a Christian Nation. Then he outlined the “mission” of the Church in this “Christian Nation”:
“#1 Witness and multiply. If each Christian makes one convert, it would produce a Christian majority overnight.
#2 Obey the Cultural Mandate. Influence young people, the professions, and the press.
#3 Pray to recapture the Christian heritage surrendered in politics.”
Kennedy got blunter in later broadcasts:
“Am I trying to Christianize America? You bet your boots I am…! I’m
not only trying to Christianize America, I’m trying to Christianize every nation in the world…! [America was founded] as it says in the Mayflower compact, the birth certificate of America, “for the advancement of the Christian Faith.”
[8 November, 1988.]
“Only those living licentious and degraded lives would object to a Christian government…. We, without a doubt, have far more heathen in America today, than when the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock.”
[Election day, 11 November 1988.]
“I am a conspirator. I am part of the Holy Conspiracy. And I am a conspirator with Christ in the greatest movement in history to change mankind…. The very word [mankind] is ours…. And in case you didn’t know: our side wins! I’ve read the end of the Book! …One day our Lord will crush the head of every serpent…”
[4 December, 1989.]
News for Glenn Beck: You’re a serpent. Think about it. With friends like that, who needs mobocrats?
There’s a fine line between vigilance and paranoia. Glenn Beck doesn’t know what’s on either side of that line.
I know where Glenn Beck is going. I know where Glenn Beck is leading you. Glenn Beck is leading you to a basement full of mildewed textured vegetable protein chunks in five gallon buckets next to your wheat storage. He’s leading you to boxes and cans of freeze-dried ice cream and dehydrated peas. He’s leading you to fifty-gallon drums full of treated water and a hand-
powered wheat grinder. He’s leading you to a garage full of 30-pound tins of US Civil Defense candy and protein wafers from 1962 packed out of the subterranean boiler room of the Downtown Athletic Club in 1972 when your ward got to clean out and distribute these expired survival commodities as they disbanded the program. He’s leading you to a lifetime of waiting for three, four, five maybe six “balloons” to go up before you finally tell him to piss off, you want your garage back, and you’re finally going to clean the rotting survivalist crap out of the basement and put in a pool table.
And then you’ll putter along with the rest of us pretty much as usual through another half a lifetime of the same old crap waiting patiently to die, while Glenn counts his gold coins and enjoys life in the catbird’s seat.
