Steve Benson

From Philosopedia

Benson, Steve (2 January 1954 - )

The name of Benson calls to mind the late President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ezra Taft Benson, who was U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1953 to 1961.

Steve Benson, his grandson, caused a sensation by leaving that church in 1993. The Arizona Republic, for which he is a political cartoonist, published Benson’s reasons, including his disagreement with the church over doctrine, history, faith, and treatment of women. Because of his outspokenness, threats were made that he would be expelled from the church, and attempts were made to intimidate his family into silence.

When Benson’s teenage daughter, the great-grand-daughter of the then current Mormon president, told her Mormon-youth religion class “that just as the denial of the Mormon priesthood to black men had been racist, so the denial of the Mormon priesthood to women was sexist,” she said she received no adequate answer.

Benson’s wife, Mary Ann, “was appalled at a Mormon patriarchal system that protected pedophiles and minimized the pain suffered by victims of sexual abuse.”

The oldest son said, “Dad, I’ll tell you why there’s religion in the world - to control people by scaring them into believing that if they don’t obey, they’re going to hell.”

“Does this mean now we’re Christian?” their six-year-old daughter asked when they left the church.

Benson has reported that he was relieved at having left the church with its “offensive notions of polygamy, racial superiority, blood sacrifice, polytheism, and Masonic-cult temple rituals.” Abandoning the church, the family found, was exhilarating and freeing. In 1999 Benson received an award for excellence in the media at the Freedom From Religion Foundation conference in San Antonio, Texas. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, he is a nationally syndicated cartoonist.

• We must never retreat in the face of threats or punishments dispensed by theocratic terrorists more interested in protecting their power and indulging their vanity, than in advancing the human condition. If, as the true believers claim, the word "gospel" means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a freethinking human being, I have come not to favor or fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.” From Latter-Day Saint to Latter Day Ain't (1999)

He described his transition from Mormonism to atheism in an essay titled "Good-bye to God (Editorial Cartoonist's Journey From Jesus to Journalism - and Beyond":

• To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren't much different from millions of poor, guilt-ridden souls who, throughout the march of human history, have hitched their hopes to mass movements of one sort or another. Eric Hoffer, in his brilliant treatise, The True Believer, explains the attraction of joining a cause: "A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following 'by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated by freeing them from their ineffectual selves = and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole'. "Of all the cults and philosophies that competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization." Once I realized this, it wasn't much of a leap out of religion altogether once I flew the Mormon coop. I simply wanted to be free from organizational groupthink. I escaped from the stuffy attic of religion's "pray, pay and obey" mentality into journalism's open laboratory of "who, what, where, when and why."
• Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as believers claim, the word "gospel" means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a journalist and free-thinking human being, I have come not to favor and fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.

Once an Eagle Scout, Benson earned a degree in political science, cum laude, in 1979 from Brigham Young University. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and has been a finalist four other years.

An atheist, he has has appeared at several annual conventions of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, where he received a "Freethought in the Media: Tell It Like It Is Award" (1999), an Emperor Has No Clothes Award (2002), and a Statuette of Liberty Friend of Freedom Award (2003). For several years beginning in 2001, Steve teamed up with Freedom From Religion Foundation staffer Dan Barker for the inimitable "Tunes and 'Toons" production, an irreverent look at freethought and religion in the news combining cartoons, music and satire. Some of their jointly - written parodies, "Godless America" among them, are recorded on the Foundation's "Beware of Dogma" CD.

{CA; FFRF;Freethought Today, June-July 1994 and August and December 1999}