Mormon
From Philosopedia
MORMON
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Mormon, Book Of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims that its founder, Joseph Smith, was visited by God and Jesus Christ, who told him not to join any established church. Later in a revelation he was instructed to form the church and was directed to a hill in Palmyra, New York, where golden tablets contained a revealed book. Smith translated The Book of Mormon from these tablets that allegedly gave God’s historical account of the Western Hemisphere from about 600 B.C.E. to 421 C.E. After the Christ was crucified, according to the revelations Smith received, he appeared in North America and ministered to its inhabitants, who were believed to be descendants of immigrants from Jerusalem. Mormons using the book hold that theirs is the only true Christian faith. Through proxy they baptize the dead, whom they believe were denied an opportunity to join the church. They believe that God dwells near the planet Kolob, with his many wives and countless spirit children, whom He sends to Earth as humans to be tested. Marriage and family relationships last for eternity, according to the revealed “truths.” {Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, 31 May 1998}
Mormon Church
The Mormons originated in the United States in the nineteenth century, with teachings based on the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The latter was allegedly revealed by angels to Joseph Smith, a poor, half-literate seventeen-year-old, who was told to look for some golden plates bearing a history of ancient America which God had hidden on Hill Cumorah, near his father’s farm in upstate Manchester, New York. He went, he saw, but the angel he talked to would not let him possess the plates. Finally in 1827 the angel allowed him to take the gold book, and in time he decoded the book’s “Reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphics and dictated his translations to a scribe. At one time Joseph gave 116 pages of the translation to a follower who lost them. Angry angels punished him by repossessing the plates. After months of prayer and meditation, he got the text back and in 1830 published the Book of Mormon, but he was left empty-handed and could not keep the plates.
Under the leadership of Brigham Young, the Mormons moved to Utah and laid stress on hard work, loyal family life, and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Mormonism was once controversial because of polygamy, but the church repudiated the practice in 1890 and no longer sanctions it. It also closed the priesthood to blacks, who, according to Mormon doctrine, carried the mark of Cain. That policy, however was reversed in 1978 because the church’s President said he had “a revelation.” John L. Brooke in The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (1995) tells how on his father’s side Smith was descended from a line of village magicians. In the wake of Salem witchcraft trials in the 1690s, the Smiths had practiced white witchcraft. On his mother’s side, Smith inherited a mix of sectarianism and hermeticism (an interest in alchemy, magic, and the occult). Brooke’s goal was to explore “the particular affinities, latent and manifest, running between the religious culture of prophesy and restoration and the occult cultures of popular conjuring and esoteric hermeticism.”
How it was possible for an ignorant farm boy to have come up with a religion that now claims nine million members or more remains the most astonishing of Joseph Smith’s alchemical achievements.
(See entries for Steve Benson, grandchild of Mormon President Ezra Taft Benson and Gentile).
As to how Virgil Thomson was turned onto marijuana by the Mormons’ President, see entry for Thomson.)
Mormon Critics
D. Michael Quinn in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) wrote of being a closeted gay Mormon who was excommunicated by his church but still considers himself a true Mormon. Vern L. Bullough, reviewing the work, wrote, “I long ago ceased to regard myself as a Mormon and believe religion is a matter of choice, not of biology. I regard Quinn’s interpretation of Mormonism as a major flaw in his work.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}
During the 2007 Presidential debates in the United States, candidate Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister, said to fellow candidate Mitt Romney that he did not know whether Mormonism was a cult or a religion. "I think it's a religion," he is quoted as saying. "I really don't know much about it. Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" When this resulted in newspaper headlines, Huckabee apologized to Romney, saying, "I would never try, ever, to try to somehow pick out some point of your faith and make it, you know, an issue, and I wouldn't." But Huckabee was expressing a Christian belief that Mormonism departs from the Christian belief in a unified Trinity and portrays Jesus Christ and Satan as God's literal offspring, making them "spirit brothers."
Mormon Homosexuals
D. Michael Quinn in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) wrote of being a closeted gay Mormon who was excommunicated by his church but still considers himself a true Mormon. Vern L. Bullough, reviewing the work, wrote, “I long ago ceased to regard myself as a Mormon and believe religion is a matter of choice, not of biology. I regard Quinn’s interpretation of Mormonism as a major flaw in his work.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}
Mormon Missionaries
“Where did you serve your mission?” Mormon girls are said to ask men asking for a date. Depending upon the men’s answer, Andrew Jacobs has written, “they won’t even date you.” The pressure to serve a mission is intense, young Mormons find, “and those who don’t can find themselves on the fringes of Mormon life.” A two-year mission is considered a rite of passage for Mormon men who reach the age of nineteen. Women, who make up only 17% of the missionary force, must wait until they are twenty-one and are not pressured to become missionaries the way men are. Their focus is more upon marriage and having families, and they are not allowed to hold the priesthood, perform baptisms, or supervise confirmations. Upon their nineteenth birthday, however, men must interrupt whatever else they are doing and go out into the world to proselytize. Although church officials claim there is no pressure to win converts, many missionaries say that those with a prodigious tally, not just five to seven people a year, can expect a hero’s welcome upon their return home and promotions in the church hierarchy.
Citing examples of Mormons who quit the church, Jacobs noted that in Mormonism “You either believe everything or nothing: there is no gray area.” As a result some quitters who have “lost the fire” confess that they worried about becoming an apostate. But they sometimes question the church’s doctrines or become disillusioned upon discovering that potential converts are offered access to the church’s generous welfare program. Disapproving of such, they become lapsed Mormons despite the pressure they feel from their Mormon neighbors against anyone “who wants out.”
Although the Salt Lake City “Temple Square” brand of Mormonism does not practice polygamy, pious Mormons are advised, according to K. L. Johnson (New York Times Magazine, 21 March 1999), “that they will have the opportunity to take on more than one wife after death so that they may become head of their own expansive patriarchies.” In New York City, the number of members has more than doubled from 1990 to 1997, almost entirely because of people who have converted to the faith. An estimated two hundred forty Mormon missionaries operate in the city, and 20,123 individuals were converted in 1997 because of their efforts. Worldwide, the church’s membership has grown from four million in 1978 to ten million in 1998. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church has 6,000 missionaries around the world, Mormons have 60,000 working in 160 countries. {Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, 31 May 1998)
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith (1805-1844)
Smith, the American Mormon leader who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, said that in 1827 he found golden tablets God had sent to him. In 1829 upon translating the tablets, he wrote The Book of Mormon.
In his short life, he took thirty-three wives, including a mother and a daughter, the widow of his brother, and two sisters. Eleven were between 14 and 20 years of age, nine were 21 to 30, eight were in his own peer group (31 to 40), two were 41 to 50, and three were 51 or over. Counting Emma, his first wife, he may have had an additional eight wives.
After his death, almost all of the wives married again, many having already been in secular marriages—thus, in addition to polygamy (plural wives) the early Mormons practiced polyandry (plural husbands). According to Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1998), the wives experienced depression, despair, anxiety, helplessness, abandonment, and anger by fulfilling “their sacred duty.”
{Vern L. Bullough, “What God Has Joined,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1998}
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Commonly called Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe that their founder, Joseph Smith, had golden tablets revealed to him by God. Those tablets, translated as the Book of Mormon, were dropped from the sky at Palmyra, New York. Mormons followed Smith westward, founding Salt Lake City in Utah in 1847, three years after a mob murdered Smith and his brother Hyrum in 1844. Under the leadership of Brigham Young, the Mormons weathered hardships and built a communal economy. Plural marriages within the group prevented Utah’s admission to the Union until 1896, but in 1890 the church withdrew its sanction of polygamy. The church is led by a three-member First Presidency and by the Council of Twelve (the Apostles).
Mormons believe in baptizing those who died without hearing the Mormon message. As a result, they have established massive genealogical records which include an estimated 200,000,000 people who were baptized and added to the index. Included are Anne Frank, Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and other non-Mormons. Because of intense pressure from Jewish groups, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints signed an agreement to remove from their Index all Jewish Holocaust victims, except those with descendants who are current Mormons and approve of their Jewish ancestors’ inclusion.
A separatist group, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was organized in 1852 and has its headquarters in Independence, Missouri.
D. Michael Quinn, in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996), found that “most of Utah went apoplectic” at his assertions that several prominent Mormons might be gay. “When I wrote that [Mormon Church founder] Joseph Smith slept with men all his life,” he told The Advocate, 3 March 1998), I meant slept with them.” Quinn also alleged that the former director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir never married and referred to his protégés as his “boy chums” and “the loves of [his] life.” Quinn, who had been a full professor at Brigham Young University,” resigned in 1988 and was excommunicated from the church in 1993. Quinn - himself a homosexual - laments the church’s homophobia and its hyprocisy.
(See entries for Steve Benson, grandchild of Ezra Taft Benson, a Mormon leader; for non-theists Charles Chaplin and W. C. Fields; and for Virgil Thomson.)
{CE}
