The following is a very personal rant. If you love Jesus, hit the delete key now.
Carl
For such an omnipotent Being, God certainly does change His mind often. Knowing the beginning and the end, and being Perfect, he nonetheless created a beautiful garden and created a man...and as an after thought, a woman and left them to live forever in happiness. But God had goofed by putting the tree of knowledge in that park. But He knew He had done this because He knows the beginning and the end and He is perfect. So He kicked the kids out. And the rest of His book is filled with mistakes and changes of plans, and suffering due to these errors in judgment.
And to top it all off, He, the Perfect One who knows the beginning and the end, He dumps all the blame on us!!! Us!!! The poor dumb dopes He created in the first place.
Could He have created a perfect person? Well, let's see how he did with His Angels. Take Lucifer for example. That brightest of all archangels. Oops! How the Hell did Lucifer fall from Grace?
And more than once God had to clean up His own mistakes. Floods, fire and brimstone, plagues, it's a sad commentary on what a Perfect Being can screw up.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----From: Mike EdwardsSent: Monday, October 29, 2012 8:21 AMSubject: Re: the mormon ethicI remember as a teenager, growing up in the LDS faith, I asked my African
American sunday school teacher why blacks couldn't hold the priesthood until
1973, and was told that some one or other in 1973 had a vission that God had
changed his mind about the standing of African Americans in the church.
God's a bit flaky, I guess.
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2012 9:08 PM
Subject: RE: the mormon ethic
> And while I agree with some of the points made about the present LDS
> church, this article does ignore some important facts in Mormon church
> history. These include:
>
> 1) Joseph Smith told three different stories about his first vision during
> his lifetime, and the one that the article quotes from is the last one.
> The differences are substantive, including the name of the personage he
> spoke with and whether or not that personage was actually an angel.
>
> 2) Joseph Smith's first polygamous relationship came with his teenage
> housemaid in 1834. When Emma found out about the affair (Fannie Algar, the
> girl involved, became pregnant), she had the girl evicted from the house.
>
> 3) The papyrus upon which the Book of Abraham was released by the LDS
> church in the late 1960s for Egyptologists to interpret. It turned out to
> be a text on how to conduct ancient Egyptian funerals.
>
> 4) Joseph Smith not only practiced polygamy, he practiced polyandrea (not
> sure of spelling). He would secretly marry the wives of the faithful while
> their husbands were away on Mormon missions. There are cases where it is
> not known whether the father of some of the offspring was Joseph Smith or
> the women's original husbands (visit
>
> http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org
>
> for more information on this subject; the site is run by a gentleman who
> is still, at least in name, a practicing Mormon).
>
> 5) The reason that Missouri Governor Boggs requested that the Mormons
> leave his state was that Joseph Smith told his followers in sermons that
> they had the absolute right to take property belonging to the Gentiles
> (anybody not belonging to the LDS church) and claim it as their own. Many
> of the faithful followed Mr. Smith's advice.
>
> 6) There is some very good circumstantial evidence to suggest that Mr.
> Brigham Young in fact ordered the Mountain Meadows massacre in response to
> the death of one of the LDS church's apostles at the hands of a man from
> Arkansas whose wife had left to become part of the apostle's harem. The
> apostle's name was Orson Hyde.
>
> 7) While the LDS church ended polygamy on paper in 1890, it would take
> another 14 years and an investigation of the first Mormon Senator, Reid
> Smoot, to actually end the practice. In fact, Woodrow Woodruff, the man
> who signed the church's retreat from polygamy, actually married another
> wife after he signed the treaty about a year before his death (from a
> heart attack) in 1898. It is believed that the polygamous colonies that
> dot parts of rural Utah and Nevada (including the Warren Jeffs clan) are
> being secretly supported by some members of the LDS community today.
>
> Some websites to visit for more information on these subjects from
> ex-Mormons who studied their way out of the LDS church include:
>
> http://www.exmormon.org
>
> http://www.mormoncurtain.com
>
> I would also recommend two books (I don't know if they are on Bard):
> "Under the Banner of Heaven" by John Krakaur (not sure of spelling of
> author's last name) and "No Man Knows My History" by Fawn Brody. The first
> deals with the murder of Brenda Lafferty by her husband's brother because
> of her outspokenness; the second is a biography of Joseph Smith written in
> the 1940 by the niece of one of one of the LDS Church's prophets (she
> would be excommunicated from the church for her efforts); she would also
> be one of the first to suggest that Thomas Jefferson had offspring with
> one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.
>
> Yes, Miriam, the LDS church is very much worth avoiding if one can.
> --
> Ted Chittenden
>
> Every story has at least two sides if not more.
> ---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Really interesting. But I'd rather be a heathen. I think I'd even rather
> be
> a Pagan Shaman.
>
> Miriam
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of joe harcz
> Comcast
> Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2012 6:23 PM
> To: blind democracy List
> Subject: the mormon ethic
>
>
>
> Jackson Lears The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism How the
> revelation to Joseph Smith led to Bain Capital. The Mormonizing of
> America:
> How The
>
> Mormon Religion Became a Dominant Force in Politics, Entertainment, and
> Pop
> Culture By Stephen Mansfield (Worthy Publishing, 264 pp., $22.99) People
> of
>
> Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture By Terryl L. Givens (Oxford
> University
> Press, 414 pp., $29.99) Falling in Love with Joseph Smith: My Search for
> the
>
> Real Prophet By Jane Barnes (Tarcher, 294 pp., $25.95) The Mormon People:
> The Making of an American Faith By Matthew Bowman (Random House, 336 pp.,
> $17)
>
> The Book of Mormon: A Biography By Paul C. Gutjahr (Princeton University
> Press, 256 pp., $24.95) Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet By John G. Turner
> (Belknap,
>
> 500 pp., $22.99) LDS in the USA: Mormonism and the Making of American
> Culture By Lee Trepanier and Lynita K. Newswander (Baylor University
> Press,
> 166 pp.,
>
> $14.95) I. All religious traditions, no matter how carefully re-designed
> to
> suit modern tastes, nurture strange beliefs-strange, at least, to
> non-believers.
>
> What could be more bizarre, to those outside the faith, than theories of
> transubstantiation or reincarnation, and debates about the location of
> Limbo
> or
>
> the heritability of Original Sin? Yet a certain strangeness may be
> inevitable in such matters. Theologians ask ultimate questions. Out of a
> natural cosmos,
>
> they try to make supernatural sense. They are fashioning faith, and any
> faith worth the name strains credulity. Credo quia absurdum est" was the
> motto
>
> attributed to the Christian apologist Tertullian. While most religions
> (including Tertullian's) have distanced themselves from this absurdist
> paradox,
>
> the insight behind it survives to suggest that religious faith and common
> sense are profoundly different ways of knowing. For several centuries,
> Americans
>
> have been living under the regime of common sense-hard-headed empiricism,
> Yankee ingenuity, and so on-with respect to practical affairs. Yet at the
> same
>
> time this "nation with the soul of a church" (as G.K. Chesterton called
> it)
> has produced a plethora of emotionally charged creeds, most of them
> claiming
>
> exclusive access to the deity while denouncing their rivals and
> predecessors
> as cold, false, and dead. For cultural historians, the question arises:
> how
>
> have Americans brought their white-hot faith into harmony with the cool
> practicality of their everyday lives? How have they connected theology to
> ethics,
>
> precepts to practice? The classic answer to these questions was proposed,
> of
> course, by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
>
> Weber did not equate the two terms of his title. He suggested instead that
> Protestant injunctions to disciplined achievement re-cast the Biblical
> doctrine
>
> of the calling, making all work God's work and turning the world, in
> effect,
> into a monastery. The acquisition of wealth was an unintended consequence
>
> of actions aimed to magnify God's glory. As the spiritual framework faded
> and accumulation became more acceptable, the Protestant Ethic became the
> Spirit
>
> of Capitalism-a set of moral and psychological sanctions for systematic
> moneymaking. Weber brilliantly charted the connections between precepts
> and
> practice,
>
> but succeeded less well in tracing ethics to belief. One might have
> expected
> the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to produce quietism, if not
> despair;
>
> but instead it underwrote an ethos of ceaseless striving. How did a
> theology
> that disdained good works create a world of good workers? Weber's answer
> was
>
> that good works "are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but
> of getting rid of the fear of damnation. Protestants fled from "salvation
> panic"
>
> into a frenetic busyness, which distracted them from anxiety even as it
> failed to discharge their sense of guilt. The psychological thinness of
> this
> argument
>
> suggests that at times even analysts as subtle as Weber missed the
> complexities of the relation between religious belief and social practice.
> In America,
>
> the playground of unfettered capitalism, Protestant self-help reinforced
> conventional success mythology; but Protestants also longed to create a
> Kingdom
>
> of God on Earth before Christ's millennial return, and those longings
> helped
> to create a welfare state that would begin to tame capitalism, however
> inadequately,
>
> during the early decades of the twentieth century. Reformers railed
> against
> the "parasitical" manipulations of finance capital, sprinkling their
> speeches
>
> with Scripture and recalling the Puritan determination to elevate the
> interests of the public good over schemes for private gain. Despite its
> central role
>
> in legitimating economic development, the Protestant Ethic was also
> devoted
> to imagining alternative commonwealths and searching the nuances of the
> inner
>
> life. Neither of these tendencies could be smoothly assimilated to the
> capitalist version of rationality. For much of American history, the
> marriage of
>
> Protestantism and capitalism was only fitfully consummated. The marriage
> of
> Mormonism and American capitalism, by contrast, has been less troubled by
> conflict.
>
> After an uncertain start, it has become stable and satisfying for both
> sides. There could scarcely be a better time than now to look into this
> relationship.
>
> This, we are constantly told, is "the Mormon moment. The prospect of a
> Mormon (and capitalist) president is only a straw in a mighty wind
> sweeping
> across
>
> the land, according to the conventional wisdom offered by Stephen
> Mansfield
> in The Mormonizing of America. His list of Mormon success stories overlaps
>
> with many others. Apart from politics (Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, Harry
> Reid), Mormons have ascended to prominence in sports (Steve Young, the San
> Francisco
>
> 49ers quarterback), entertainment (the Osmonds, apparently the most recent
> example available, unless you include Glenn Beck), popular literature
> (Stephenie
>
> Meyer, the author of young adult vampire tales), and above all business
> (J.W. Marriott, the hospitality tycoon; Stephen Covey, the success guru
> and
> author
>
> of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Clayton Christensen,
> management consultant at the Harvard Business School, a favored Mormon
> hangout, and
>
> the subject of a recent admiring profile in The New Yorker). The Mormons
> have even moved far enough into the mainstream to become the butts of
> Broadway
>
> burlesque. The assumption behind much of the "Mormon moment" chatter is
> that
> Mormons are especially suited for success in the brave new world of
> unregulated
>
> capital: tanned, rested, and ready. Their abstention from alcohol and
> caffeine keeps them healthy. Their self-discipline, stemming from
> missionary
> work
>
> and a strict code of personal morality, strengthens their capacity to
> compete in a global marketplace. Their attachment to family and community
> insulates
>
> them from the market's worst abrasions. Their zeal for education in
> science
> and technology gets them first-class seats on the cyber-express. And their
>
> organizational genius makes them the ideal candidates to steer the lean,
> mean neo-liberal corporation through the storm-tossed business cycles
> ahead.
> The
>
> Mormon Ethic, which bears a strong resemblance to the Protestant Ethic in
> its Gilded Age prime, has become a powerful constellation of values for
> our
> second
>
> Gilded Age-perhaps a reassuring counterweight to the feeling that we are
> sailing into the globalizing future with no moral ballast whatever.
> Contemporary
>
> Mormons, whose ancestors were chased from town to town across the prairie
> by
> Protestant mobs, have become paragons of patriotism and icons of success.
>
> In 1856, the Republican Party platform declared Mormon polygamy one of
> "two
> relics of barbarism" in America (the other was slavery). In 2008, as in
> every
>
> other recent election, Mormons voted overwhelmingly Republican. What any
> of
> this has to do with the Mormons' religious beliefs is a tricky question.
> Most
>
> journalistic observers are content to characterize the Mormon faith as
> "weird," then toss off a few lines about sacred underwear and a quotation
> from Mark
>
> Twain describing The Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print. Few ask what
> is
> Mormon about the Mormon Ethic. How does it differ from an updated version
>
> of Victorian Protestantism? Mansfield quotes a cable news pundit's
> characteristically profound observation: "Mormons have goofy, mystical
> ideas
> that produce
>
> wonderful, earthly success. How this production occurs is anybody's guess.
> Fortunately we do not have to leave things at that. Recent scholarship has
> provided
>
> us with a socially grounded history of Mormon ideas from the formative
> years
> of exile through the tortuous twentieth-century process of assimilation.
> What
>
> emerges from this literature is an epic in three acts. The first is the
> extraordinary story of Joseph Smith, the barely literate treasure digger
> in
> western
>
> New York whose revelations directed him to dictate (or as he preferred to
> say, to "translate") The Book of Mormon-which despite its many soporific
> passages
>
> is an astonishing work of the religious imagination. Smith's prophecies
> and
> pronouncements created almost the entire corpus of Mormon doctrine; his
> visions
>
> galvanized thousands of believers, who followed him from New York to
> Missouri to Ohio to Illinois, attracting hostile hordes at every turn,
> especially
>
> when rumors of Mormon polygamy began to spread. After Smith's murder in
> 1844, Brigham Young takes center stage and holds it for the entire second
> act.
>
> Young was a crude Vermont carpenter who was nonetheless a magnetic public
> speaker, in glossolalia and in English, compelling enough to wrest power
> from
>
> rivals and command respect from the faithful. They followed him from
> Illinois to the Great Salt Lake, where he governed an embattled theocracy
> for thirty
>
> years, resisting legal and military assaults by "Gentiles" (non-Mormons),
> including the U.S. Army. And the third act of the saga begins after
> Young's
> death
>
> in 1877, when the tale takes a less heroic turn toward the halting and
> complex process of Mormon assimilation to American society-a process led
> by
> pragmatists
>
> and organization men, only occasionally enlivened by gusts of zeal. Under
> relentless pressure from the federal government, the Utah Mormons
> abandoned
> polygamy
>
> in 1890, achieved statehood in 1896, and in subsequent decades became more
> royalist than the king, clinging to late Victorian values while the rest
> of
>
> American society slid away from them. In many ways the history of the
> Mormons follows the classic pattern described by Max Weber, Ernst
> Troeltsch,
> and
>
> other sociologists of Christianity: the routinization of charisma, the
> transformation of an ecstatic sect into an institutional church, and of
> the
> Mormon
>
> Ethic into the Spirit of Capitalism. But such an account neglects the
> persistence of Mormon beliefs, which mix familiarity with strangeness. The
> familiar
>
> parts evoke central themes in popular American evangelicalism-the faith in
> bodily resurrection and the reunification of families in heaven; the
> waning
>
> but still powerful sense of millennial expectancy, which encourages the
> stockpiling of goods for Armageddon; the conviction that America has a
> divinely
>
> ordained part to play in the sacred drama of world history, with Mormons
> themselves cast in the leading roles. Even Smith's beliefs that Mormons
> were
> a
>
> covenanted people like the ancient Israelites, that America was the new
> Holy
> Land, that when Christ returned he would show up in Jackson County,
> Missouri-all
>
> of this was a more specific and literalist version of themes evoked by
> Puritans from John Winthrop to Jonathan Edwards. Yet the literalism
> ultimately set
>
> Mormons apart, as it seeped beyond familiar narratives into ontological
> claims. Smith's point of departure was a rejection of all Christian
> traditions,
>
> Protestant or Catholic. During his first vision, which occurred when he
> was
> fourteen years old, he asked the Personage who appeared to him what church
>
> he should join and (Smith later recalled) "I was answered that I must join
> none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me
> said
>
> that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those
> professors were all corrupt. For Mormon believers, Mormonism is to
> Christianity as Christianity
>
> is to Judaism-a new dispensation that supersedes the old. The age of
> revelations is not over; God still speaks to humankind (at least
> occasionally) through
>
> the Mormon authorities. Evangelical critics who insist on distinguishing
> between Mormonism and Christianity are on firmer ground than the
> ecumenical
> secularists
>
> who want to assimilate everyone to the vibrant family of American
> pluralism.
> In fact there is a theological gulf between Mormonism and Christianity.
> The
>
> point of acknowledging it is not to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy, but
> to clarify the Mormon role in modern American culture-to explain how the
> Mormon
>
> Ethic came to integrate so smoothly with the twentieth-century Spirit of
> Capitalism, even more smoothly than the Protestant Ethic had done. To be
> sure,
>
> tensions between Mormon communalism and liberal individualism persisted
> throughout the nineteenth century, and down to the present the Mormon
> tradition
>
> continues to produce socialists, environmentalists, and pacifists as well
> as
> capitalists. But by now capitalists hold a commanding lead, and part of
> the
>
> explanation lies in Mormon theology. As in Protestant Christianity, the
> history of Mormon thought revolves around the effort to contain the molten
> core
>
> of ecstatic piety in a hard carapace of intellect. Most doctrines involve
> a
> dialectic of release and control. The idea of continuous revelation
> allowed
>
> the humblest Saint to imagine that God might still speak to him-this was
> the
> soul of Mormonism in the early decades. It opened the possibility that
> changes
>
> in the faith might come from anywhere, but even Joseph Smith knew that
> revelations could not be allowed to everyone. Eighty years after Smith's
> time, the
>
> Mormon hierarchy announced that revelations would only be vouchsafed to
> the
> appropriate authorities. Spiritual experience was available only through
> channels.
>
> God is still speaking to us, but only to some of us. The containment of
> ecstatic experience through ecclesiastical authority is a familiar
> strategy
> in
>
> many religious traditions, but it plays a special role in Mormonism. Few
> if
> any religions celebrate the boundlessness of human potential with the zeal
>
> of Mormons. No wonder they need to counter that centrifugal force by
> demanding deference to centralized authority. The sense of boundlessness
> came from
>
> the collapse of distinctions between sacred and profane, God and man. You
> have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods, ... Joseph Smith announced,
> "and
>
> be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done-by going from
> a
> small capacity to a great capacity, from a small degree to another, from
> grace
>
> to grace ... from exaltation to exaltation. This implicitly henotheistic
> vision-a High God and many lesser ones-was dynamic, not static; it
> mandated
> "eternal
>
> progression" in this world and the next. And it promised Godhood to man.
> As
> Smith's disciple Lorenzo Snow put it: "As man now is, God once was; as God
>
> is now, man may be. The Mormon God is anything but an absolute,
> transcendent
> Other. He is flesh and blood as well as eternal spirit, and his creative
> powers
>
> are not what Christians might have thought. He did not make something from
> nothing. Matter pre-exists God: what is traditionally called creation was
> actually
>
> the organization of matter. This Mormon version of materialism embodies an
> understandable recoil from theological abstraction, the Platonic heritage
> that
>
> has disembodied much Christian discourse for centuries. As Terryl Givens
> suggests in his probing book People of Paradox, the Mormon divinization of
> the
>
> material, even the banal, is akin to a sacramentalist outlook, but without
> the sense of transcendence and mystery that a remote God provides. Givens
> is
>
> a practicing Mormon with an uncommon sensitivity to the complexities and
> the
> vulnerabilities of his faith. He acknowledges the risk of hubris in the
> Promethean
>
> quest for Godhood, recalling the serpent's promise in paradise ("ye shall
> be
> as gods"). This Promethean impulse is reinforced by a Mormon tendency to
> use
>
> a language of empirical certainty, even for propositions that may seem
> anything but empirical-a tendency traceable back to Joseph Smith. As a
> result of
>
> his visionary experience, he said, "I have learned for myself that
> Presbyterianism is not true. The search for empirical (or
> pseudo-empirical)
> certainty,
>
> bounded by priestly authority, is one engine of eternal progression.
> Salvation is a process, not a goal; its core is action, not introspection.
> Much of
>
> this theology resonates with commonsense American sensibilities-the
> priority
> of matter, the organizer God, the celebration of doing over being, the
> faith
>
> in progress, the prospect of perpetual personal growth. No wonder Harold
> Bloom, in search of The American Religion, found Smith's vision
> irresistible.
>
> What Whitman sang, Joseph Smith actually embodied," Bloom wrote. To be
> Adam
> early in the morning, confronting a God who had not created him, and who
> needed
>
> him to become a god himself. It is alarming how easily this exalted
> humanist
> vision turns into psychobabble. Consider the cautionary example of Jane
> Barnes,
>
> who was a writer on the PBS documentary The Mormons. Falling in Love with
> Joseph Smith is a breathless and weepy confessional account of her
> encounter
>
> with the faith, which apparently helped her to understand (if only
> retrospectively) a series of crises in her life. We learn far more than we
> want to know
>
> about Barnes's flight from conventional family life into a long-term
> lesbian
> affair and her late-life relationship with an old boyfriend, now dying by
>
> inches of Parkinson's disease. You may wonder what all of this has to do
> with Joseph Smith, but in fact he is just the sort of "religious visionary
> with
>
> no regard for the rules" who can speak to us amid the "particle
> accelerator"
> of contemporary life. Joseph, in fact, was not "a man of his time": he was
>
> a "naïve modernist. Or postmodernist: he was "edgy" and given to irony.
> The
> Book of Mormon is a self-conscious meditation on texts, pervaded by
> "campiness.
>
> His life was like a rock star's in its "round-the-clock experiencing of
> contrasting realities. But for Barnes, Smith's big appeal is his "sexual
> energy,"
>
> which overflows into polygamy. Her book is an extended exercise in
> a-historical (or anti-historical) projection. Beneath the silliness,
> however, Barnes's
>
> book reveals an important truth about Mormonism's origins amid the
> cultural
> ferment of the young republic. The yearning to enact an endless process of
>
> re-inventing the self, on an open prairie of boundless possibility: these
> grandiose sentiments animated penniless treasure diggers as well as New
> England
>
> intellectuals and Brooklyn poets. In his way Smith was a kindred spirit,
> as
> well as a contemporary, of Emerson and Whitman. Their celebration of the
> self
>
> and its potential survives in the success mythology of our own time,
> diminished by market discipline. Mormons, like other Americans, have had
> to
> orchestrate
>
> the tensions between private longings and public necessities. II. In the
> beginning was Joseph Smith. According to Matthew Bowman's able synthesis
> in
> The
>
> Mormon People, Smith's spiritual career had "a particularly American
> flavor-a confident amateurism, an affinity for re-creation, renewal, and
> resurrection,
>
> excitement at the possibilities that religious liberty, nearly unlimited
> land, and economic prosperity might bring. His millennial vision demanded
> "a
> nation,
>
> a new Israel, a people bound as much by heritage and identity as by
> belief.
> And that was what his efforts eventually created. Smith grew up in a
> society
>
> thronging with counterfeiters and confidence men, not to mention the
> confidence men of the Lord-the itinerant revivalists who swarmed across
> the
> rural
>
> districts, stirring hearts and saving souls. Coming of age amid this
> ferment
> in western New York during the 1810s, young Joseph was "somewhat partial
> to
>
> the Methodist sect" but was quickly disappointed when he discovered that
> he
> could "feel nothing" even surrounded by tears, trances, and convulsions.
> This
>
> was the evangelical nightmare: the discovery that your religious feelings
> are not aroused like those of everyone else around you. Yearning for
> intense
>
> emotion as proof of authentic conversion, Joseph read the First Epistle of
> James and found this passage: "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of
> God.
>
> Joseph entered a secluded grove and asked of God: what church should I
> join?
> According to his later account, two Personages appeared in a pillar of
> light,
>
> and one responded: none. Three years later an angel who called himself
> Moroni (the name has always had unfortunate associations for skeptical
> non-Mormons)
>
> appeared by his bedside, announcing that God had work for him to do. He
> told
> the boy of a book deposited under a stone in a hill nearby, written on
> gold
>
> plates, recounting the full story of the former inhabitants of the North
> American continent. The fullness of the everlasting Gospel, Moroni said,
> was
> contained
>
> in it. Joseph claimed that he found the stone, pried it up, and discovered
> a
> crude box containing gold plates and two "seer stones" set in a silver bow
>
> attached to a breastplate-much like the Urim and Thummim used in ancient
> Hebrew divination. He reached for the plates and was hurled backward. He
> must
>
> wait four years, said Moroni, to show that he was a sincere seeker, and
> not
> just another gold-digger. The neighborhood was full of them. Smith
> reputedly
>
> had a knack for finding buried treasure, and was hired by a local farmer
> to
> dig for silver on his property. Finding none, the young man did find the
> comely
>
> Emma Hale in the village nearby. Emma resisted her parents' opposition and
> became Joseph's wife. She was committed to his vision, but she was in for
> a
>
> bumpy ride. Four years after his first discovery Smith returned to the
> hill
> and retrieved the box. In The Book of Mormon: A Biography, Paul Gutjahr
> deftly
>
> untangles Joseph's efforts to keep the plates hidden while he translated
> what he called the "reformed Egyptian" characters that covered them.
> Hunched
> down
>
> under his hat, peering at the plates through the seer stones, he read
> aloud
> what he saw-at first laboriously, then in a rush of inspiration. The
> process
>
> took several months and required absolute secrecy. Only a few trusted
> associates could be involved. Emma was one; Martin Harris, a prosperous
> local farmer,
>
> was another. Harris's financial backing would prove crucial. When the
> translation was finished, he mortgaged his farm to print five thousand
> copies of
>
> The Book of Mormon. According to Joseph, the angel Moroni then reappeared
> to
> him and asked to have the plates back. He of course complied. From its
> first
>
> publication in March 1830, Smith's book resonated with Americans' longings
> for immediate communication with the deity, in their own time, on their
> own
>
> ground. If one accepted Smith's prophecies-and he was apparently a
> compelling prophet-the Book of Mormon showed that God had spoken not only
> to
> the ancient
>
> Jews of the Middle East, but also to the ancient inhabitants of the
> Americas. And most important, writes Gutjahr, "God was still speaking. The
> Book of
>
> Mormon defies summary, but its outlines can be traced. The action begins
> in
> about 600 B.C.E. A group of Israelites flees Jerusalem as the Babylonian
> armies
>
> approach. They arrive in the Promised Land, which turns out to be the
> North
> American continent. The founding family contains two rival sons, Nephi and
>
> Laman, who found bitterly opposed civilizations, the righteous Nephites
> and
> the wicked Lamanites. The first narrator is Nephi, and when he dies Mormon
>
> takes over. Mormon is a Nephite soldier, writing as an old man in about
> 300
> C.E., when the Nephites have been corrupted by prosperity. Mormon turns
> the
>
> project over to his son Moroni, who adds a few afterthoughts and buries
> the
> plates in the Hill Cumorah, where he directs Joseph Smith to find them
> centuries
>
> later. As Bowman observes, The Book of Mormon is structured like a
> jeremiad:
> the rise and fall of the Nephites parallels the cycle of prosperity and
> corruption
>
> in Israelite civilization, as described in the Hebrew Bible. By the 1820s,
> the jeremiad had long been a pervasive rhetorical form among American
> Puritans
>
> and their republican descendants. Nor was that the only connection between
> this supposedly timeless text and its early American context. There were
> references
>
> to debates over infant baptism, church government, and revivalism,
> allusions
> to fears of secret societies, and other evidence that marked the book as a
>
> product of its historical moment. The Book of Mormon itself was close to
> the
> Protestant Bible. For the Mormons, it was not a source of doctrine but a
> proof
>
> of Smith's divine inspiration. After The Book of Mormon, Smith continued
> to
> receive (or to imagine) new revelations on matters great and small. The
> most
>
> theologically important were revelations concerning the baptism of the
> dead,
> who could be posthumously saved by being brought into the Mormon fold, and
>
> the King Follette sermon, which multiplied gods and urged humans to aspire
> to Godhood. Besides revelations, these books also contained more
> "translations"-
>
> expansions and elaborations of scriptural narrative. The most important of
> these was the Book of Abraham, which Smith claimed to have translated from
> Egyptian
>
> papyri that he had bought in 1835 from a traveling showman who exhibited
> mummies for profit. The Book of Abraham fostered notions of pre-mortal
> life,
> recalling
>
> Wordsworth's child "trailing clouds of glory" from heaven, but without the
> romantic sense of loss; it also contained a prohibition against black
> people
>
> entering the Mormon priesthood. The power of the priesthood became a
> central
> feature of Mormonism. What Smith called "the priesthood of Aaron" had the
>
> power to baptize converts and to ordain other priests. But another
> priestly
> tier was needed to contain the energies of ecstatic experience. Midway
> through
>
> a church conference in 1831, when Mormons began speaking in tongues, Smith
> intervened and re-imposed order by invoking the authority of a higher
> priesthood,
>
> the Melchizedek priesthood, who would be the most likely recipients of
> divine revelation. The two priesthoods were organized into "quorums" by
> office.
>
> All were appointed, not elected. The most powerful became the Quorum of
> the
> Twelve Apostles, which Smith was inspired to organize in 1835. The
> president
>
> and two assistants made up the First Presidency. These would become the
> crucial offices in the decades to come. Hierarchy was creeping into the
> faith,
>
> as a way of cementing community with authority. The Mormon community
> expanded quickly, mixing visions of heavenly and earthly glory. Smith and
> Sidney Rigdon,
>
> a converted Baptist, shared a revelation of nearly universal salvation.
> Everyone would be saved (except for a few "sons of perdition," who denied
> Christ
>
> to his face), but there would be degrees of glory, from the telestial
> (ordinary wicked folks, including "liars and sorcerers and adulterers"),
> the
> terrestrial
>
> ("honorable men of the earth" who were not devout Christians) and the
> celestial (baptized members of "the church of the Firstborn"). Despite the
> ambiguity
>
> of that last phrase, the emphasis was on the importance of heavenly
> community and the ease of entering it. But what really pulled the Mormons
> together
>
> was the dream of building Zion on Earth. In 1831, Smith and his followers
> joined Rigdon in Kirtland, Ohio and took to calling themselves "The Church
> of
>
> the Latter-day Saints" to emphasize their millennial expectations. But
> Kirtland was not Zion. When Smith visited Missouri in 1831, he discovered
> what he
>
> believed would be Zion's actual location, in the blossoming prairies
> outside
> Independence. This, he declared, was where the Garden of Eden had been,
> and
>
> where Adam would return in the Last Days to visit his people. Jesus would
> not be far behind. Smith was transforming the American continent into the
> Holy
>
> Land. Still, money presented a problem. Smith had always managed it
> ineptly.
> As part of his early preparation for financing the New Jerusalem, he
> announced
>
> the doctrine of "consecration," which involved turning your property over
> to
> the church, which would then return to you enough to provide for your
> family,
>
> and keep the rest. The idea never really caught on, especially among the
> more prosperous Mormons, and Smith eventually replaced consecration with
> tithing
>
> (donating ten percent of gross income to the church). When times grew
> tight
> in Kirtland, Smith attempted to charter a bank (the accepted way of
> manufacturing
>
> money in antebellum America); and when the legislature refused, he
> resorted
> to crude subterfuge, stamping the prefix "anti" before the word "banking"
> on
>
> his Kirtland Safety Society notes and opening an "anti-bank" (which he
> assumed was technically legal) with $100,000 worth of pseudo-currency. The
> man accused
>
> of counterfeiting a religion had been reduced to counterfeiting money. The
> scheme lasted three weeks, until the notes crashed and the "anti-bank" ran
> out
>
> of capital. Religious capital was another matter. Smith was accumulating
> it
> rapidly, in Ohio but also in Missouri, where the spread of Mormon
> settlements
>
> was provoking violence among the Gentiles. Governor Lilburn Boggs of
> Missouri declared that Mormons must be driven from the state or, if
> necessary, exterminated,
>
> so as to protect the public peace. Vigilantes attacked a Mormon settlement
> at Haun's Mill, leaving seventeen dead, including women and children.
> Terrified
>
> Mormon refugees fled east to Illinois, where they soon settled in
> Commerce,
> on the Mississippi. Joseph renamed it Nauvoo, a crude transliteration of a
>
> Hebrew word meaning "beautiful. It was not Zion, but it was the site of
> many
> theological innovations, including the Emersonian notion that man, could
> he
>
> but realize it, might move through mortality into divinity. The Nauvoo
> temple became the site where Smith's revelations were implemented as
> ordinances.
>
> Baptism of the dead was already underway, but in 1842 Smith inaugurated
> the
> Endowment, which involved the washing and anointing of the priesthood, the
>
> donning of white undergarments and robes, and the reaffirming of the
> Mormon
> priests' lineage to the priests of the Hebrew Bible. The temple was also
> the
>
> place where family relationships would be sealed for all eternity-another
> source of stability amid the chaos and the violence surrounding the
> embattled
>
> sect. The revelation that marriages could be sealed for eternity,
> alongside
> Smith's fascination with Old Testament patriarchy, became the basis for
> polygamy.
>
> In 1843, Smith made the revelation known to a select inner circle. Plural
> marriages, as Bowman writes, were "not ... private communions but rather
> links
>
> in a great network of relationships. Many involved men taking
> responsibility
> for dependent widows or other women who might otherwise be destitute. Some
>
> remained unconsummated. But it would be ludicrous to pretend that polygamy
> lacked a sexual charge. Smith managed to "seal" himself to several women
> in
>
> secret. But Emma knew, and she was not pleased. She stoically endured the
> new regime, but always publicly denied that her husband had ever taken
> another
>
> wife. He eventually married thirty. But when he proposed plural marriage
> to
> Jane Law, she fled in revulsion to her husband William, a member of
> Smith's
>
> First Presidency. William bitterly contested the doctrine, but Smith stood
> by it, and the Laws were excommunicated. Concluding sadly that Smith was a
> false
>
> prophet, William Law began to attract a band of dissenters, with their own
> newspaper. The Nauvoo Expositor denounced polygamy as corruption and
> demanded
>
> a return to original Mormonism. Urged by Smith, the Nauvoo City Council
> declared the paper guilty of libel. City marshals destroyed the press, the
> plates,
>
> and any remaining copies. An ad hoc militia formed quickly, intent on
> fighting back against the Mormons. Smith was charged with "rioting" and
> was
> murdered
>
> in jail two days after he had surrendered himself to the authorities. The
> prophet had become a martyr. III. Just weeks after Smith's death, ten
> thousand
>
> Mormons gathered in Nauvoo to decide which of two men should succeed
> Joseph
> Smith as leader of the Mormon church. Rigdon, a member of the First
> Presidency,
>
> gave a long and meandering speech. He was followed by Brigham Young, then
> president of the Twelve. Young simply affirmed that the Twelve were the
> rightful
>
> collective heirs of Joseph Smith's authority and that he was the head of
> the
> Twelve. But he was a spellbinding orator. Those present later said that
> when
>
> Brigham Young spoke they heard the voice of Joseph Smith speaking through
> him. Surely he was the man to lead the Mormons forward, into a new
> Promised
> Land.
>
> John Turner shows how he did it, in his strong and authoritative
> biography.
> Young was born in 1801 in rural Vermont, to a hardscrabble farm family. In
>
> 1813 they moved west to Genoa, New York. The Youngs were a Methodist
> family,
> which in that time and place meant a strict moral code punctuated by bouts
>
> of revivalist ecstasy. Young was unmoved. Men were rolling and bawling and
> thumping," he later recalled, "but it had no effect on me. Yet he followed
> his
>
> siblings in joining the Reformed Methodists at twenty-three, insisting on
> baptism by total immersion. Young married Miriam Works in 1824 and moved
> to
> Mendon,
>
> near Rochester, where he built a house on his father's land and took up
> carpentry. In 1827, when they heard stories of Joseph Smith and the golden
> plates,
>
> he, his parents, and his siblings were all receptive listeners. Later
> Young
> and his friend Heber Kimball claimed to have seen a vision of a battle in
> heaven-muskets
>
> cracking, swords clashing-on the very night the plates were found. In
> January 1832, Young traveled to Columbia, Pennsylvania, to meet up with
> Mormons gathered
>
> there. They spoke in tongues, and Young felt the exaltation that up to
> then
> had eluded him. Back in Mendon, where several Baptist families had already
>
> embraced Mormonism, Young and his family all converted. It was an
> experience
> of authority as well as ecstasy: "I was ordained to the office of an Elder
>
> before my clothes were dry upon me," Young recalled. Soon after his
> baptism,
> Young was with several other elders when one began speaking in tongues and
>
> Young "caught the contagious fire," as Turner writes. Even in a visionary
> era, glossolalia was a fringe phenomenon. But it was central to early
> Mormonism.
>
> After Young's wife died in September he headed for Kirtland, where Smith
> had
> just relocated. The night they arrived, the newcomers spoke in tongues.
> Smith
>
> called what he had heard "the pure Adamic language," affirming that it
> came
> from God. Young felt embraced and honored. He rose quickly in the church,
> through
>
> perseverance and loyalty but also owing to displays of spiritual
> power-delivering animated addresses to the priesthood, singing songs of
> Zion
> in a foreign
>
> tongue. In 1834 he married Mary Ann Angell, who had been drawn to his
> magnetic preaching. Four years later Young left for England, where he
> played
> a major
>
> role in tripling the Church membership (to six thousand) during the year
> he
> was there. Not long after Young returned from abroad, in early 1842, Smith
>
> commanded him to "go & get another wife. Young hesitated, but soon got the
> hang of it. He eventually acquired fifty-three plural wives, from ages
> sixteen
>
> to sixty-six, who produced fifty-eight children. Mary Ann, who had thought
> that she was signing on to a monogamous marriage, responded to polygamy
> with
>
> "displeasure and stoic acceptance," Turner observes. She began to attend
> Young's subsequent sealings, and allowed herself to be sealed to him for
> eternity.
>
> Widows and other dependent women were sealed for time, not eternity-except
> to their deceased husbands. After Smith's death and Young's oratorical
> triumph
>
> over Rigdon, Young formalized the church presidency, which consisted of a
> president and two counselors-Heber Kimball and Young's cousin Willard
> Richards.
>
> Rigdon charged that they were counterfeit prophets, and was promptly
> excommunicated. The Nauvoo Mormons remained under siege. Accusations
> spread
> that the
>
> town sheltered adulterers and thieves, and manufactured counterfeit
> coins-what the locals called "Nauvoo Bogus. Anti-Mormon mobs burned
> outlying
> settlements.
>
> Mormon leaders prepared to head west. In the months they remained in
> Nauvoo,
> Young used the new temple to consolidate a synthesis of heavenly and
> earthly
>
> authority: "everyone in their [sic] order, before God and each other-this
> is
> the secret of the whole thing," he said. With this vision in mind, he
> opened
>
> the Endowment ceremony to the whole community. Thousands of Mormons
> pressed
> forward into the temple, sworn to secrecy about the rites they were to
> receive.
>
> This was a key moment in Young's consolidation of power. But not everyone
> was impressed. On the verge of the Mormon move west in 1846, Emma Smith
> stayed
>
> behind. The Twelve have made bogus of it," she said. IV. Poring over maps,
> the Mormon leadership pondered possibilities until Young proclaimed that
> the
>
> Great Basin would be the Saints' refuge. Young would lead the advance
> guard,
> the Camp of Israel, in a race for Zion. Crossing the Mississippi in
> February
>
> 1846, the Camp slogged across Iowa. Progress was excruciatingly slow, and
> the emigrants were forced to stop in eastern Nebraska, where they
> established
>
> Winter Quarters. In Winter Quarters, far from prying Protestant eyes, the
> Mormons practiced polygamy more openly. Young began gathering his wives
> together,
>
> urging those who had stayed behind to join him for the trek west. Some
> did.
> They experienced the benefits of sisterhood, which was some consolation
> for
>
> the trials of polygamy-the basis of which, Young made clear, was absolute
> patriarchy. The husband, he said, is "the head & God of the woman.
> Rejecting
>
> Victorian notions of female purity, he declared a woman to be "the
> [dirtiest] creature .... dirtier than a man. Nor did women have any
> authority in the
>
> domestic sphere, as Victorian ideology decreed. Only Young or his
> representatives could authorize marriages. It was men over women, and
> Young
> over all.
>
> For Young as for Smith, the goal of all humanity was "eternal fellowship
> and
> familial glory. Mormon communalism contrasted with Protestant
> individualism.
>
> If men are not saved together," Young said, "they cannot be saved at all.
> In
> January 1847, in Winter Quarters, Young announced his only revelation that
>
> would be canonized by the church: he identified the Mormons with the
> people
> of Israel, and reaffirmed the authority of the Twelve to lead the Exodus.
> The
>
> announcement was celebrated with music and dancing. Whoever goes to hell
> I'll warrant you won't here [hear] fiddling or have dancing," he said. All
> music
>
> is in heaven, and all enjoyment is of the Lord. Young sacralized the
> ordinary-farming, fencebuilding, dancing-yet feared what would happen if
> he
> allowed
>
> his people to "act the nigger night after night. When the emigrants
> arrived
> in the Promised Land in July 1847, Young made it official: "this is the
> place,"
>
> he said. Of course the cursed descendants of the Lamanites, the Ute and
> Paiute Indians, were already there. But Young was sure they would provide
> little
>
> obstacle to his vision-a theocratic and largely autonomous kingdom. Not
> all
> the Apostles were at ease with his autocratic rule, but Young insisted
> that
>
> he was the only "oracle" of revelation. He managed to get himself
> unanimously re-elected First President by the Twelve at a meeting when his
> opponents
>
> were absent. Again he chose Kimball and Richards as counselors. When the
> election results were announced, the gathered Mormons shouted hosanna, and
> violins
>
> played "God Save the King. Young's theocratic sovereignty was confirmed.
> Things became more complicated in 1850, when Utah became a territory and
> President
>
> Millard Fillmore appointed some non-Mormon officials and judges. Young
> rejected their authority, and in 1852 went public with plural marriage,
> which he
>
> defended on grounds of popular sovereignty and states' rights-the same
> grounds the federal government was using to decide the question of slavery
> in the
>
> territories. He also reasserted the doctrine's centrality to Smith's
> theological system. Without plural marriage, Young was certain, "there is
> not a man
>
> [who] can be a God. Back on Earth there were conflicts with the local
> Indians. Young was not averse to military action, but more commonly he
> resorted to
>
> the maxim that it was cheaper to feed them than to fight them. As for
> making
> theological sense of African Americans, Mormons depended on the curses of
>
> Cain and Ham (which did not specify dark skin as the consequence of God's
> wrath, but were widely interpreted to do so). The Book of Mormon makes the
> "seed
>
> of Cain" black, and the Book of Abraham excluded descendants of Ham from
> the
> priesthood. Though Smith had embraced a few black priests in the early
> days,
>
> the drift from racial egalitarianism to racial exclusion was
> characteristic
> of most American denominations at the time. Within a few years after the
> great
>
> migration, Young's fear of cooling ardor helped to launch the "Mormon
> reformation. The need for re-dedicated fervor was intensified by a series
> of
> natural
>
> scourges: drought, crickets, and grasshoppers created a constant emergency
> atmosphere. The Reformation included a home missionary program to monitor
> morals
>
> and "lop off ... rotten branches" from the tree of faith. Young himself,
> concerned about lukewarm commitments to plural marriage, prodded more
> people
> into
>
> it. During this same period, Young preached the doctrine of blood
> atonement:
> some sins, he announced, can be paid for only by the blood of the sinner,
>
> offered by the sinner himself or taken by another. Possible candidates
> included adulterers, murderers, and blasphemers against the Holy Spirit.
> The
> doctrine
>
> of blood atonement led to at least one castration (of a local bully) and
> to
> the assassination of several apostates. Young later mused that as a result
>
> of the doctrine there had been "quite a number killed, and, I believe,
> many
> more ought to have been. As Turner concludes, "Young, who had feared for
> his
>
> life while on the margins of Illinois society, created a climate in which
> men and women on the margins of Mormon society lived in a similar state of
> fear.
>
> Extra-legal justice accompanied the effort to revive spiritual intensity.
> In
> early 1857, Mormon leaders presented a memorial to the incoming President
>
> James Buchanan, warning that if the federal government continued to send
> "office seekers and corrupt demagogues" to Utah, the citizens would drive
> them
>
> away. Buchanan dispatched federal troops to the territory. Anticipating
> Armageddon, Young encouraged the Paiutes and other Indians to attack
> Gentile
> wagon
>
> trains and to prepare to fight the U.S. Army. The Mormons themselves would
> also prepare for a fight. They quickly found one when they encountered a
> wagon
>
> train en route from Arkansas at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. The
> Mormons, Turner writes, "shot, stabbed, and slashed the throats of
> emigrants
> who
>
> pled for their lives," including women and children. Young sent a message
> to
> try to stop the killing, but it arrived too late. He had sanctioned the
> climate
>
> of righteous anger, combined with fear and millennial expectation, that
> had
> led to mass murder. And the men who did it remained in Young's favor. No
> wonder
>
> that many observers, Mormon and Gentile, began to think that Young had
> condoned the slaughter. Meanwhile the U.S. Army was advancing. Finally the
> troops
>
> stopped sixty miles north of Salt Lake for the winter. Spring brought
> relief
> and resolution. Buchanan promised a continued military campaign against
> Mormon
>
> resistance, but offered to pardon all who would submit themselves to the
> authority of the federal government. There would be no trials for treason,
> but
>
> also no guarantees of what federal judges would do in future. Young
> accepted
> the inevitable, concealing his failure with bluster. The army marched
> through
>
> Salt Lake City and built Camp Floyd forty miles away. It was the beginning
> of the end of theocratic government in Utah. Yet Young continued to circle
> the
>
> wagons. He rededicated the Mormons to collective enterprise and economic
> self-sufficiency, urging the cultivation of tobacco and cotton and other
> cash
>
> crops. But the Saints remained economically dependent on the army that
> they
> despised. Mormon merchants needed customers with money. Meanwhile Congress
>
> was on the march. In 1862, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act declared polygamy
> unlawful and limited church holdings to $50,000. Within a few years, the
> coming
>
> of the transcontinental railroad ended the isolation of Zion. By that time
> the Saints were experiencing their own internal tensions. It was the old
> story
>
> told in the jeremiad: grasping merchants, even Mormon merchants,
> overlooking
> their obligation to the community. They will get sorrow," Young predicted,
>
> "most of them will be damned. (He foretold damnation often, for a
> self-proclaimed believer in "the contraction of hell.") He tried local
> railroad start-ups,
>
> Mormon-owned, to co-opt the impact of the transcontinentals. He also
> started
> Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution in 1868, one of the rare
> successful
>
> Mormon efforts at co-operative merchandising. In 1874, Young launched the
> United Order movement, his final attempt to revive communalism. Resources
> were
>
> pooled through the revived principle of consecration, but private property
> was not abolished. Individuals received cash returns based on their
> contributions
>
> and labor. The only settlement that abolished private property was
> Orderville, a community of poor folks in southern Utah that achieved,
> according to the
>
> novelist Wallace Stegner, a rare "communism of goods. But most Mormons
> were
> no more willing to commit to consecration in the 1870s than they had been
> decades
>
> earlier. Nor was Young himself willing to consecrate his own substantial
> holdings, which included a textile factory in Provo and more than ten
> thousand
>
> acres of farmland. Suffering from arthritis, digestive disorders, and
> urological problems, Young in decline still epitomized the melding of body
> and soul
>
> at the core of nineteenth-century Mormonism. Months before his death, he
> lubricated his catheter with consecrated oil, and recommended the practice
> to
>
> others. For Young, the sacred and the profane were forever joined. V.
> Since
> Young's death in 1877, the story of the Mormons in America has in many
> ways
>
> recalled the pattern familiar to historians of other American religions.
> The
> lowering of the emotional temperature, the reining in of ranters, the
> growing
>
> preoccupation with efficient organization-all these developments led
> toward
> greater absorption in that vast bland civil religion known as the American
>
> Way of Life. Still, there were major obstacles to assimilation. One was
> Mormon hierarchy, which to many Protestants was all too reminiscent of
> Roman
> Catholicism.
>
> But what really stuck in the Christian craw was polygamy. In 1882,
> Congress
> strengthened the Morrill Act by passing the Edmunds Act, which made
> "unlawful
>
> cohabitation" a crime and denied polygamists the right to hold office,
> vote,
> or serve on a jury. Soon after it passed, federal marshals poured into
> Utah
>
> in pursuit of polygamists. Mormon leaders fled Salt Lake City and went
> into
> hiding in various settlements throughout the state. The marshals tracked
> them
>
> down. More than a thousand men were arrested, convicted, and fined or
> imprisoned. Then, in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, the federal
> government
> took
>
> dead aim at the Mormon church itself, abolishing its incorporation and
> expropriating all its property except chapels and cemeteries. That same
> year
> John
>
> Taylor, Young's successor as president of the church, died in hiding in a
> hamlet north of Salt Lake City. Wilford Woodruff, who succeeded Taylor,
> saw
> the
>
> hopelessness of the situation. In 1890, he persuaded the Quorum of the
> Twelve to approve what became known as the Manifesto. It was neither a new
> revelation
>
> nor a renunciation of the doctrine of polygamy. It was merely a statement
> that the Mormon president intended to abide by the federal laws and would
> urge
>
> his fellow church members to do likewise. The end of sanctioned polygamy
> marked a decisive moment in Mormon history. The dream of Zion was dead, at
> least
>
> in the form that Smith and Young had envisioned it. Now it was time for
> the
> organization men to take charge of the church, and it could not have been
> a
>
> more propitious moment. Utah became a state in 1896, the year that William
> McKinley's election ushered in the reign of corporate capitalism in
> America.
>
> For the next six years, an unprecedented wave of mergers created the
> behemoths that would dominate the American economy throughout much of the
> twentieth
>
> century. Mormons, having shed their lascivious reputation, were poised to
> thrive in the new era, as the self-help ethic was re-shaped to suit the
> new
> corporate
>
> ethos of managerial expertise and "team play. In the 1850s, Brigham Young
> was routinely depicted in the press as a tyrant surrounded by a slavish
> harem;
>
> but by 1930 the Mormon President Heber Grant showed up on the cover of
> Time,
> extolled for his business acumen and his church's prudential morality. The
>
> Mormons, it appeared, had at last achieved respectability. Part of this
> transformation involved theological change. The key move was the
> re-definition
>
> of celestial marriage, a phrase that Smith had used as synonym for
> polygamy.
> In 1899, the British convert James Talmage's Articles of Faith provided
> theological
>
> justification for the view that celestial marriage was celestial not
> because
> it was plural but because it was eternal. Several decades later Grant made
>
> Talmage's view official doctrine, stating that "celestial marriage ... and
> polygamous marriage are not synonymous terms. Instead "monogamous
> marriages
>
> celebrated in our temples are celestial marriages. Armed with this
> doctrine,
> Mormons became as passionate in their defense of monogamy as they had once
>
> been of polygamy. The renewed emphasis on baptism of the dead, coupled
> with
> the disavowal of polygamy, re-figured the Mormon idea of community. The
> bonds
>
> that polygamy had created across space would now reach with renewed vigor
> across time," Bowman writes. Talmage and two other theologians, John
> Widtsoe
>
> and B.H. Roberts, began a progressive reconstruction of Mormon thought
> that
> aligned it with dominant trends in liberal Protestantism, even while they
> preserved
>
> continuity with Smith's revelations. Their synthesis, Bowman says,
> "remains
> the Mormonism believed by most Latter-day Saints today. Religion and
> science
>
> were one. God was subject to the laws of the universe and owed his
> divinity
> to his capacity to understand and to manipulate them. He was not a creator
>
> who made something from nothing; he was "a great craftsman, organizing
> previously inchoate matter. Nothing he did was mysterious; everything was
> subject
>
> to rational investigation. While the theologians brought God down to
> Earth,
> they also raised man up to heaven. Humans shared God's uncreated, eternal
> nature
>
> and they would one day share his glory through a process of "eternal
> progression"-"the refinement of the soul's capacity to participate in
> divinity through
>
> the exercise of Christ-like virtues. As they did for most Christians,
> "Christ-like virtues" came to resemble the dominant values of the moment.
> For Mormons
>
> as for their fellow Americans in the early twentieth century, this meant
> that the key to salvation became the cultivation of a disciplined
> character,
> committed
>
> to mastering the world through knowledge. This theology was ideally suited
> to the managerial ethos of early twentieth-century America. It was the
> moment
>
> when efficiency and uplift were twinned. Perhaps their most successful
> union
> surfaced in the Prohibition movement, which succeeded by 1919 in banning
> alcohol
>
> consumption from sea to shining sea. Managers hailed the prospect of a
> sober, punctual work force; moralists hailed the triumph of social
> discipline over
>
> sodden chaos. Mormons knew an opportunity to seize legitimacy when they
> saw
> one. In 1921, Heber Grant announced that adherence to Joseph Smith's Word
> of
>
> Wisdom (abstention from alcohol and caffeine) would be required of any
> Mormon seeking a "temple recommend"-the permission to participate in
> temple
> rituals.
>
> Up until that time, the Word of Wisdom had been interpreted as non-binding
> health advice. Grant, like a good managerial progressive, made it a
> prerequisite
>
> for full membership in the church. Ever since, the Mormons' abstemious
> habits have reinforced their ethic of disciplined achievement. As Mormons
> rose in
>
> respectability, their church became less tolerant of ecstatic revelations.
> Speaking in tongues was an especially embarrassing hangover from the
> primitive
>
> church. During the 1920s, the First Presidency announced that the gifts of
> miraculous healing and divine revelation were restricted to the ordained
> priesthood.
>
> Democratic spontaneity was yielding to bureaucratic regulation. By the
> mid-twentieth century, an increasingly ambitious missionary program
> created
> new
>
> organizational challenges. In 1960, the Apostle Harold Lee was put in
> charge
> of the Correlation Committee. His model was the American corporation, then
>
> at the height of its Fordist moment, and his watchwords were
> simplification
> and standardization. The correlation movement strengthened the
> institutional
>
> church, eliminated the remnants of charismatic spirituality, and
> reinforced
> the emphasis on correct behavior over theological innovation. During and
> after
>
> the 1970s, countercultural ferment provoked conservative
> retrenchment-though
> the maverick President Spencer Kimball did come up with a theological
> breakthrough.
>
> In 1978, after two years of fasting and prayer, he announced with relief
> and
> joy that he had received a revelation: black men could now be ordained
> into
>
> the priesthood. Mormons had been uncomfortable with their church's
> position
> for decades, but the leadership had dug in its heels: a fundamental
> departure
>
> from scripture could only be justified by a revelation from God. Kimball
> had
> the courage to imagine (or experience) one. But despite Spencer Kimball,
> the
>
> Udall family, and a handful of others, most Mormons joined in the
> Republican
> Kulturkampf that dominated the last third of the twentieth
> century-spearheaded
>
> by an awkward alliance of religious and economic fundamentalists. Indeed,
> the alliance was probably less awkward for Mormons than for Christians.
> Mormons
>
> embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they
> distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral
> life;
> they used
>
> their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They
> celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little
> attention
>
> to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental
> scripture confirmed that America was God's New Israel and the Mormons His
> Chosen People.
>
> It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture
> of
> the post-Reagan Republican Party. Recent poll results confirm the merger
> of
>
> Mormonism and Republicanism. As Lee Trepanier and Lynita Newswander report
> in LDS in the USA, 65 percent of Mormons identify with or lean toward the
> Republican
>
> Party-15 percent higher than Evangelical Christians and 30 percent higher
> than the general population. Moreover, they write, "56 percent of Mormons
> prefer
>
> smaller government (compared with 43 percent of the general population),
> 49
> percent of Mormons believe the government should do more for the needy
> (compared
>
> with 62 percent of the general population), and 54 percent of Mormons
> think
> the government should do more to protect morality (compared with 40
> percent
>
> of the general population). These figures confirm Mormon ties to the
> Republican Party, but they also reflect a worldview that may not travel
> overseas too
>
> well. The Mormon Moment is characterized by a vigorous missionary movement
> and a flurry of temple-building in foreign lands, but as Bowman reports,
> retention
>
> rates are low-hovering around 25 percent in Latin America, for example.
> Part
> of this stems from the resolute Americanism of the Mormons, their
> unwillingness
>
> to adjust to local customs or tastes. It may be that their faith is
> peculiarly American in more ways than one. Yet it would be a mistake to
> underestimate
>
> the Mormons' appeal, especially if they encourage the curious to explore
> the
> implications of Mormon beliefs. Terryl Givens has done that with
> extraordinary
>
> care in People of Paradox. The paradoxes in question involve the
> co-existence of apparent opposites: individualism and authoritarianism,
> epistemological
>
> certainty and endless questing, the exaltation of the mundane and the
> humbling of the sacred. In every case, the paradox seems to satisfy
> believers' contradictory
>
> longings-to choose freely and to fit in, to be confident in one's
> knowledge
> but hungry for more, to find the exalted in the familiar and the familiar
> in
>
> the exalted. Older religions might well envy the capaciousness of the
> Mormon
> appeal. But there is a price to be paid, as Givens acknowledges with
> exceptional
>
> candor. He observes that "the moment of conversion for Mormons is not
> generally seen as the recognition of one's sinful nature and
> transformation
> to a
>
> state of grace, but the moment of one's coming into possession of the
> truths
> that pertain to external realities.... There seems in Mormonism an
> emphasis
>
> on certainty, rather than faith. This sure knowledge is accompanied by an
> imperative to acquire more, but it is all external; there is no inner life
> at
>
> all. Joseph's crowned Saints are ... Faustian strivers endlessly seeking
> to
> shape themselves into progressively better beings, fashioning worlds and
> creating
>
> endless posterity, eternally working to impose order and form on an
> infinitely malleable cosmos," Givens writes. This "dauntingly eternal
> process of self-transformation"
>
> recalls the inner struggle of religious doubters in other
> traditions-except
> that there is no inner struggle, no introspection. Small wonder that
> Mormons
>
> measure commitment to their church with labels such as "active" and
> "inactive" rather than "devout" or lapsed. To be sure, certainty is a big
> payoff. But
>
> this is a religion with few opportunities for contemplation, few sanctions
> for stillness. The collapse of man into God and God into man exacts a
> comparable
>
> cost: the abolition of mystery and transcendence. From Rudolph Otto's The
> Idea of the Holy in 1917 down to the present, religious scholars have
> emphasized
>
> the mysterium tremendum at the heart of the Jewish and Christian
> traditions-the miraculous suspension of natural law, the bush that burns
> but
> is not consumed.
>
> What Otto called the sense of the numinous depends on a certain distance
> between humanity and divinity (even if that distance is sometimes bridged
> by
> intercessory
>
> prayer or sacraments). But as Givens writes, "if God is shorn of
> ineffability and transcendence, or is construed in human terms, how does
> one
> find the
>
> reverential awe that moves one to true worshipfulness? If Jesus is our
> 'big
> brother,' how can he be our Lord and God? More broadly, "in a universe
> devoid
>
> of transcendence and sacred distance ... how can wonder flourish? The
> question leads us back to Weber, who viewed the transformation of the
> Protestant
>
> Ethic into the Spirit of Capitalism as part of the larger disenchantment
> of
> the world-the great loss of wonder. Modern capitalism, he argued, required
>
> that the world be perceived as inert matter, manipulable into commodities
> by
> technicians. A God who makes the world by organizing matter does indeed
> seem
>
> the ideal deity for this economic system. The Mormon Ethic merges easily
> with the Spirit of Capitalism. Or at least with a Spirit of Capitalism.
> What
> Weber's
>
> argument left out was the huge irrational dimension of economic life under
> capitalism-the fantasies and fears, the dreams of overnight wealth and
> magical
>
> self-transformation, that pervade the popular imagination even as rational
> managers seek to maximize productivity and workers slog diligently. Magic
> and
>
> money are twinned, in our time as they were in the time of the treasure
> digger Joseph Smith. As the form of money grows more evanescent,
> evaporating
> from
>
> gold coins into numbers on a screen, its mysterious powers multiply-its
> power to compel fascination and reverence, to replicate itself
> indefinitely
> or
>
> disappear without a trace. Money remains enchanting. The magicians of
> money,
> the investment bankers and hedge fund managers who claim to have harnessed
>
> it to their ends, are as spellbound by its aura as the people who sweep
> their offices. (Maybe more so.) Indeed, it is possible to see the entire
> structure
>
> of capitalist rationality-the acres of statistics, the mountains of
> research-as a vast effort to contain the chaotic irrationality at the
> heart
> of the
>
> money economy. That effort has been more successful at some historical
> moments than at others. Perhaps the high point of the containment project
> was the
>
> Fordist moment of the mid-twentieth century-the era of generalized
> prosperity through mass production, of lumbering corporate hierarchies and
> organization
>
> men. This was the closest American society has come to the full
> realization
> of the Weberian Spirit of Capitalism. The Mormons fit into this epoch
> nicely,
>
> though sometimes eccentrically. I once knew a woman who grew up in that
> era,
> whose father had converted from Catholicism to Mormonism: he packed the
> whole
>
> family off to the Utah desert and set them to work making bricks, as he
> had
> seen the ancient Israelites do in The Ten Commandments. True to their
> theology,
>
> the Mormons have always been about making things, from clay or stone or
> steel. This attachment to the material-along with financial discipline-was
> how
>
> they contained their own fascination for the mysterious power of money.
> They
> avoided speculation, disdained debt, paid in cash. That was what it meant
>
> to aspire to Godhood. One of the most remarkable aspirants during the
> Fordist moment was George Romney, the Mormon head of American Motors, who
> organized
>
> matter with extraordinary success: he manufactured a compact car, a good
> one. He served three terms as governor of Michigan and ran for president.
> It
> would
>
> be hard to imagine a better embodiment of the Mormon Ethic-disciplined
> achiever, loyal family man, conscientious public servant. But what
> happened
> when
>
> money became detached from materiality, as it did (once again) during the
> last third of the twentieth century? Could Mormons become detached, too?
> It
> is
>
> tempting to see the Mormon presence at the Harvard Business School as a
> symptom of disengagement from material production, since business schools
> are temples
>
> of immaterial capital-sites of enchantment for Mormons and Gentiles alike.
> They are one of the places where young managers learn to press apparently
> rational
>
> methods into the service of money mania. As Clayton Christensen's work
> demonstrates, it doesn't matter what you make as long as you can sell it.
> The product
>
> is nothing, the method is everything. But a stronger sign of Mormon
> detachment from making things is the career of George Romney's son Mitt,
> who
> has outdistanced
>
> his father politically and (one suspects) financially. A faithful Mormon
> like his father, Mitt came of age at a post-Fordist moment-the go-go
> 1980s,
> when
>
> manufacturing had lost its allure and the magic of speculative capitalism
> was reasserting itself. As deregulation encouraged the formation of
> private
> equity
>
> firms, Mitt and his partners at Bain Capital occupied the cutting edge of
> financial innovation. They helped to pioneer the deployment of leveraged
> buyouts,
>
> manipulating other companies' debts (which Bain itself had created) to
> make
> quick profits for themselves. They manufactured nothing, except money. A
> photograph
>
> taken at the time of the company's founding shows Mitt and his partners
> posing with their product. Some of them, including Romney, are displaying
> banknotes;
>
> others are stuffing them into their mouths. This is not a picture of
> disciplined achievement or the productive organization of matter. It is a
> picture
>
> of men in the grip of a money-fetish. Romney presents himself as the
> quintessential CEO, the turnaround guy, the expert at re-organizing failed
> companies.
>
> But in fact he is merely another magician of money. He built his career by
> using the methods he learned at the Harvard Business School to conjure
> something
>
> from nothing-or less than nothing, as he loaded previously solvent
> companies
> with debt and stripped them of their assets (including, of course, their
> labor
>
> force). He may use the rhetoric of productivity to reconcile his faith
> with
> his economic practice, but the rest of us have reason to fear that we are
> back
>
> in Joseph Smith's world of confidence men-of smiling scoundrels, earnest
> frauds, and Nauvoo bogus. Jackson Lears, Board of Governors professor of
> history
>
> at Rutgers, is editor of Raritan and is the author, most recently, of
> Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
> (HarperCollins). © 2012,
>
> The New Republic.
>
>
>
>
>
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