Are Mormons a CULT?
Romney 2012
Truth be told, Christianity itself began as a 'cult'
No Man Knows My History
Is Romney's strange campaign hurting the Mormon image
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Are Mormons a CULT?
Romney 2012
Truth be told, Christianity itself began as a 'cult'
No Man Knows My History
One of the early woman academics in the United States was also a scholar and biographer of note. In her well-written work on the early LDS "Mormon" movement, No Man Knows My History, Fawn M. Brodie digs into the depths and torments that possessed Joseph Smith. But even more, she sheds insight and perspective on a seminal controversy in the history of the westward movement. At the heart of that movement was the issue of white relations with American Indians. Was conflict inevitable? Not always.
"Few episodes in American religious history parallel the barbarism of the anti-Mormon persecutions. That the town in which these began should bear the name of Independence only accentuates the tragic irony of the case. Intermittently for thirteen years burnings and pillaging hounded the Mormons wherever they tried to settle in the Mississippi Valley, until it seemed there was something inevitable in the terrorism that bloodied their trail."The tenuous shifting area known as the frontier attracted men who though brave and adventurous were often also illiterate, thriftless, and antisocial. Preferring hunting to farming, they packed their wagons and moved on west as soon as neighbors came within gunshot distance. Western Missouri, according to a traveling preacher of the time, had a "a semi-barbarian population constantly pressing on the heels of the retreating savages."
"In ordinary times this class would have sold out to the Mormons and moved on west, but now a barrier hemmed them in. Andrew Jackson in 1830 had fixed the Indian frontier by law, thereby temporarily forbidding them the space for roaming to which they were accustomed, and the vast plains to the west, barren of timber and short of water, did not invite the careless encroachment on Indian territory that had been so common in the central Mississippi Valley.
"The Missourians were irritated by reports of Mormon sermons like those of Oliver Cowdery, who told the Delawares that they "should be restored to all rights and privileges; should cease to fight and kill one another; should become one people; cultivate the earth in peace, in common with the pale faces. . . ." To any frontiersman this was political imbecility.
"Moreover, the Mormons were not luckhunters, eager to move on if new territory opened up or a crop was blistered by frost. They had come to stay till the millennium, buying and building with a kind of desperate haste lest the day of the Lord's coming find their lamps untrimmed. Their very industry counted against them. Professional gamblers, real-estate speculators, and tradesmen, who lived by their wits and swallowed the political emoluments of the county, watched with a dour resentment Mormon cabins springing up and Mormon crops showing green among the tree stumps. "
This account taken from No Man Knows My History. by Fawn M. Brodie. published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. c. 1971. pages 130-131.
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Of the Mormon doctrine of plural wives, Gordon Allport, in his The Nature of Prejudice [1954] grants the unsoundness, as social policy, of that doctrine. However, he then proceeds to identify much of the persecution of the early LDS pioneers as a function of bigotry with roots in "a prurience of interest and licentiousness of fantasies" by those obsessed with what they saw as Mormon queerness or nonconformity. "Opposition to the sect drew nourishment from the conflict that many people had within their own lives." |
The Book of Mormon, speaking to Native Americans, states as part of its purpose to reveal to them "what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers."According to the Book of Mormon, a small band of Israelites under Lehi migrated to the Western Hemisphere about 600 BC. Upon Lehi's death his family divided into two opposing factions, the Lamanates and the Nephites. In course of time, the Lamanites became dark-skinned, the Nephites light-skinned. After numereous wars and alliances, intrigues and conflicts, the Nephites were destroyed.
Ultimately, in Native American past, they received a visit from Jesus Christ, following his resurrection and ascension (3 Nephi), and he preached to them, instructing and encouraging them in the ways of righteousness and glory. Mountainy singer?
LINK: Tanner, Book of Mormon. "The Prophet Joseph Smith called the Book of Mormon "the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion" and said that a person "would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book" ... "for it contains the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ" (D&C 20:8-9).
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What happened to dissenters in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony happened to Mormons, Roman Catholics, and Jehovah's Witnesses, as each entered the public consciousness. Unpopular because of the strangeness of their behavior, they became handy targets of what can only be called projected panic. Dissident sexual behavior always makes these panics worse. Mormon polygamy did not cause anti-Mormon feeling (which had elicited violence even before polygamy was instituted), but it added fuel to the fire, as salacious antipolygamy novels focused on the alleged promiscuity and hyperfertility of Mormon men. Catholic sexuality was also a central focus of the anti-Catholic panic, as genteel pseudo-moral pornography portrayed convents and monasteries as places of wild sexual indulgence, and as political propaganda inspired fear of a Catholic takeover on account of the allegedly hyperfertile nature of the Catholic family. [p340. Martha Nussbaum. Liberty of Conscience: in defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality.] |
Spiritual Wifery
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It may surprise you, but do you realize that the practice of polygamy is actually one of the common threads between Christians, Jews and Muslims? And even today polygamy is still widely practiced, and even more widely acknowledged. It is estimated that over three billion people around the world today still believe in polygamy. Deuteronomy contains a rule for the division of property in polygamist marriages. Old Testament figures such as Abraham, David, Jacob and Solomon were all favored by God and were all polygamists. Solomon truly put the "poly" to polygamy with 700 wives and 300 concubines. Mohammed had 10 wives, though the Koran limits multiple wives to four. Martin Luther at one time accepted polygamy as a practical necessity. Polygamy is still present among Jews in Israel, Yemen and the Mediterranean. Indeed, studies have found polygamy present in 78% of the world's cultures, including some Native American tribes. (While most are polygynists — with one man and multiple women — there are polyandrists in Nepal and Tibet in which one woman has multiple male spouses.) As many as 50,000 polygamists live in the United States. |
Martha Nussbaum writes
The spirit of The Book of Mormon is that of return to an authentic biblical religion, away from the Gentiles' pseudo-religion. Joseph Smith saw himself, and was seen by others, as a "prophet-restorer."
Joseph Smith's voracious reading and his deep love of the Old Testament had put the biblical text deeply into his mind, so that, when his mind was freed of constraint, in a trancelike or visionary state, he had experiences n which a text came cascading out that drew on his extensive reading. Whatever we believe, Richard Bushman seems correct in suggesting that deliberate fraud is not the best explanation for the text as we have it [in The Book of Mormon and the other LDS scriptures.
Joseph Smith was an extraordinary religious entrepreneur. A man of charismatic attractiveness and intense energy, he made a deep impression even on those who set our to scorn him. Josiah Quincy, visiting Smith at Nauvoo, Illinois in 1844 (shortly before Smith was murdered), called him a "man of commanding appearance ... a hearty, athletic fellow, with blue eyes standing prominently out upon his light complexion, a long nose, and a retreating forehead." ..... Quincy's summary was that Joseph Smith is a "fine looking man" is what the passer-by would instinctively have murmured. [p181-182]
On the furor against Mormon polygamy
John Stuart Mill had remarked that about that time (thinking of both Britain and America) the lot of the wife in a monogamous marriage was even worse than that of a slave. Yet, as Nussbaum notes, America reacted to Mormon polygamy with what can only be called public hysteria around the issue. "Popular novels depicted polygamy as a hotbed of sensual lust, rape, physical brutality, and incest. These novels were little better than a kind of prejudice-filled pornography." [Nussbaum gives a graphic illustration. p187-88]
Nussbaum's own considered assessment is that:
Critics seem to project their own deepest guilts onto a handy target
Mormons like so many before became handy scapegoats for the attacks of those who, apparently, (secretly) envied
and never truly wanted to understand. Mormons must be some kind of sex fiends or perverts, devil-worshipers or spousal abusers. All the worst fetishes or obsessions of their own sub-conscious were somehow 'PROJECTED' onto this handy target. A way to both vent, justify themselves, while at the same time titillating their imaginations (or secret fantasies).
With Catholics it was the Nativism movement -- pervasively anti-foreign and anti-Catholic in nature -- and the lurid sensationalism of rumor-mongering trash narratives like."The Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, of The Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal." Supposedly the priests had one vast harem at their disposal. Nuns were just (in effect) prostitutes for the lusts of lecherous priests. The Maria Monk account has been called a fabrication, clearly. By her account, Monk related her experiences with Catholicism, which involved physical and sexual abuses, forced sexual intercourse with priests, even the murdering of nuns and children. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant, floggings as penance. "Confession" a prelude to beatings and sex. Straps weighted with metal, somebody's sexual imagination, gone amok.
Quakers in England suffered with their supposed spiritual wifery, free love accusations. The "Strong women and weak men" charge. The husband of Hannah Lightfoot eagerly cuckolded himself for the greater good. Quakers reputedly rejected conventional Christianity and threw out mainstream mores in favor of open marriage or free love, often including a "love feast" of communal mates (cuckolded Quakers whose spouses practice spiritual wifery.)
In modern America the activists who rallied around the Civil Rights movement were besieged with similar accusations and public misunderstanding. Were they communist influenced? The white women were called "deceived" and "used" as white slaves by brash young black panthers. The white husbands were "naive" and brainwashed. Liberal pawns of some sinister predators (black devils, apparently). The white women were branded sluts and nigger-lovers. After the rousing prayer meetings and flamboyant sermons there was rampant miscegenation going on. Racial integration was just a cover for a great deal of mixing, sex, white cuckolds and loose wives giving themselves to these horny black radicals.
Liberated Christians
Spiritual Wifery
I think that eventually our society will break through and allow a more free-form kind of bonding, such as polyamory and group marriage. I know people who are doing this now, they have to hide it, but someday it will not be scandalous. If nothing else just think what the rent would be with three (or four) working adults splitting it. Goodness, I could buy the expensive cat food then!
Tuesday, 19 October 2004 8:08 pm
I had an anthropology teacher once that told us a story from when she was in Africa (I do not remember where in Africa). She said that the women there could not understand her not wanting a polygamous relationship. Their reasoning was if there was only one wife she would have to take care of the husband everyday, the more wives the less you had to deal with him. It makes a certain sense in a very patriarchal way.
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Mormon history -- a window into this period of the past
Chief Washakie -- Shoshone leader welcomed Mormon ideals
David Wyman Patten -- the first apostle martyr of the Church cf. bio by Lycurgus A. Wilson
Anglo-American "New Israelites" the 1800's - the Oliver Crowdery Pages (Mormon History)
Uncanny correspondences - linking Aboriginal American cultures
and ancient Hebrew - Shemite tribes
Interracial love, lust, sex and marriage - is there solid moral or spiritual justification for the practice?
Honorable Mia Love, Mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah - first African-American woman to head the city
Mitt Romney, this man can heal America -- why the right wing hates him -- First, Let's Unite the Republicans
My TRUE IDOL (country music folk vocalist). Her words are so strong but amazing
Meet Jewel Kilcher
Franklin & Billy Graham endorse Mormons -- Glenn Beck gets excited --
Eerie proof Book of Mormon is right
Nansela Matthews, aka Annalee Skarin -- American Mystic A poetic gift, her pen dipped in Heaven
The Puzzle of Annalee Skarin : American Mystic -- excommunicated for rocking the boat?
To be a Woman and a Scholar -- Dorothy Gies McGuigan on Elena Cornaro
First Woman to write in English -- Victor Shepherd on Juliana of Norwich
Gaia and the Gylanic Tradition -- Riane Eisler's The chalice and the blade
Excerpt from intimate history of Jefferson -- by Fawn M. Brodie
Cochranites - their 'spiritual wifery' innovation
put children first
shannon irish
In His Name
The New Martyrs
Honoring the Irish
Nothing is Lost
| Man is a child of God, created in his image. He is destined to be free, and though subject to death, his spirit will continue to live, will again become united with his body, and he will become a living, immortal soul. "Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection." (D&C 130:18) |
Simon Bamberger, governor of Utah (1916)