sotto voce

Religions since the New Testament have mostly tended to contradict it, usually by what might be termed Galatianism— the replacement of faith with works in justification. In the case of the 'foolish' Galatians, circumcision was the 'work' that made Christ useless. Romanism made water baptism, then the Mass and other 'sacraments' essentials for salvation. Muhammad made prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and charity into justifying works. The Reformation did not necessarily make progress, if a Lutheran still believed that he had to kneel to receive 'consubstantiated' bread, if a Presbyterian believed that he broke God's law if he failed to attend service on a Sunday. However, the most significant long-term effect of Protestantism was the tenet of exclusive priesthood of all believers, that eventually excluded a central teaching authority from all organisations claiming to be Protestant.

Mormonism arose in the USA when Romanism, its superstitions made to seem increasingly absurd by the march of science, its authoritarianism out of place in a thorough-going democracy, its basic theology at odds with a nominally Protestant, capitalist milieu, was on the wane. If Joseph Smith did not sense an opportunity for a 'Protestant', unsuperstitious yet quietly authoritarian cult, then he was merely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. Like Romanism, Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses rely on a strongly authoritarian, yet low profile central 'priesthood' to keep iron control over members. Mormonism makes water baptism a condition of justification, and insists that justification is achieved by 'obedience to laws and ordinances', whereas the Bible says that true good works are only possible by people already justified. What many fail to realise, or perhaps do not really want to realise, is that there are more organisations claiming to be Christian that invert Christian soteriology than teach it accurately.

But without theological expertise, one can usefully define a cult by its insistence on exclusiveness, on its own membership, as means of gaining salvation, and Latter-Day Saints qualify along with other American 'Christian' religions. All of these cults, along with Eastern Orthodoxy, Romanism, Islam and Pentecostalism borrow the authority of the Bible, while simultaneously disowning its authority.

Sarpedon

I disagree with the assertion that the gospels are evangelical tools rather than the 'second kind' of religious text. I wonder why the author makes that distinction?

steve_bnk

The gosples may not have been intended as an hiostorical acciounting, but proomotional embellished literature for converts. Meant to be a 'tall tale', not fact.

Sarpedon

I understand that is what the author is asserting, but what is the evidence for it? To me, the gospels have different sorts of tales: jesus's teachings, jesus's miracles, jesus's death and ressurection. The first of these may indeed be of use for evangelism, but the other two seem to be entirely about proving jesus's divinity, in the way the author ascribes the book of mormon. I wonder what justification there is for ignoring this and focusing on his teachings.

ideologyhunter

Mormonism began as a hoax, a masterful put-on, so its writings are not good analogies to other scriptures. There's always Joseph Smith's contented smirk behind them. But Mormonism is a good place to contemplate the nature of orthodoxy and the persistence of belief in the face of contradictory proofs.
Consider what you have to ignore, explain away, forget, or not be told of, to be a faithful Mormon -- at a minimum:
1- The falsehood that a flourishing Jewish culture existed in Mesoamerica somewhere about 20 or 25 centuries back -- a culture that had achieved metallurgy, a coinage system, wheeled vehicles, and had erected numerous temples and stone palaces. There is no polite way to discuss this -- it's a convoluted fable from the brain of Smith. A lie.
2- The fact that Smith was a convicted conman in the New York courts -- a 'glass-looker,' as they called it back then. Using a 'peepstone,' he charged gullible landowners a fee to search for buried treasure on their property. Just a year or two after his conviction he claimed to have found golden plates in the ground -- and to have used that same peepstone to help in translating the 'reformed Egyptian' on them.
3- Among plentiful examples of his deceit, the most damning is his claim to have translated the Book of Abraham from some papyrii that came into his possession. Unluckily for Mormons, the original papyrii resurfaced in the mid-60s, and they proved to be a funereal text with no connection whatever to the text Smith had penned.
In fact a few hours of research is all that's needed to show that this religious tradition is provably false. (This is one reason why they tell you never to argue politics or religion. With Mormonism, there's really no polite way to credit the tradition with any possible basis in truth.)

steve_bnk

It is simplistic to categorize Mormonism as a con job fabrication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith

'...In the winter of 1816-17, Smith moved with his family from Vermont to the burned-over district of western New York, an area repeatedly swept by religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening. As was typical of their era, the Smiths believed in visions, prophecies, and folk magic, and Smith was hired as a scryer. According to Smith, beginning in the early 1820s he had visions, in one of which an angel directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Christian history of ancient American civilizations. In 1830, he published what he said was an English translation of these plates as the Book of Mormon, and organized the Church of Christ as a restoration of the early Christian church. Church members were later called Latter Day Saints, Saints, or Mormons...



During the Second Great Awakening, the region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm.[7] Between 1817 and 1825 there were several camp meetings and revivals in the Palmyra area.[8] Although the Smith family was caught up in this excitement,[9] they disagreed about religion.[10] Joseph Smith became interested in religion at about the age of twelve,[11] and he participated in church classes,[12] read the Bible, and reportedly showed an interest in Methodism.[13] With his family, he also took part in religious folk magic,[14] a common practice at the time.[15] Like many people of that era,[16] both his parents and his maternal grandfather had visions or dreams that they believed communicated messages from God.[17]..'

Smith was a scryer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying

'...Scrying (also called seeing or peeping) is a magic practice that involves seeing things psychically in a medium, usually for purposes of obtaining spiritual visions and less often for purposes of divination or fortune-telling..'

Mormonism is a Christian variant.

The Great Awakening is the source of modern evangelicals. Visions and the like. Smith was a classic mystic/seer.

I'd say the orgins of Mormonism amd its founder is good insight to how Christianity emerged from Judaism. The same mystical environment peopled with superstitious people.

DCHindley

Steve,

I have to agree that the Great Awakening period was the reactor in which the Latter Day Saints formed.

I remember reading statistics (the book is in storage) that indicated that in this period only about 33% of the population considered themselves "religious".

Out in the Western US, the settlers had spread out in a way that often left considerable distances between these "religious" individuals, meaning that churches weren't being established. There was so much to do just to survive that many put it on the back burner, but many surely read the bible to the best of their ability and made their own peace with God.

In the East, where the well-established churches were, the clergy were facing apathy. Church attendance even among certified members of congregations were well below what occur today.

What the great awakening preachers were able to do was motivate these apathetic types or self-peacers to "get in shape" and a lot of people did so.

However, I do not agree with you that Mormon "inspiration"/"vision" was shared by great Awakening evangelism. Evangelical movements had existed for some while, but was confined to "traditional" Christianity. However, the visionary splinter groups like Shakers and Quakers were solidly Evangelical in theology. Most missions were being conducted by Presbyterians and baptists all over the world and even in the USA in the 19th century.

It took the Plymouth Brethren in the UK to inject a bit of "spirit" into traditional Christianity. Thank Darby and Schofield. It was, I think, from these "spirit filled" holiness devotees that we can find the roots of LDS theology. But it needed a bit of spice, so it met up with the other, "non-traditional" type of "self-peacer" spiritists, the shaman types into "folk" religions.

There were also a goodly number of spiritists and occultists around, both East and West. Do a search on "The Leatherwood God" for a really weird 1916 fictional story about a charismatic "prophet" type who enthralled many in an isolated area of one US mountain state, claiming to be God incarnate but also incredibly libertine ("naughty" bordering on "nutty") in his views. Modern charismatics of this type would be Edgar Cayce and Elizabeth Claire Prophet.

I do not believe the Mormons used "revival tents" or anything like that, but bible studies and readings at homes, presented to friends or acquaintances, tying up the loose ends of all this stray traditional and non-traditional religious ideas into the form you find it now.

I was looking into a document at Oberlin College in Ohio, among the papers of a regionally known story teller Solomon Spaulding (who resided for a time on Northern Ohio, Western Pennsylvaina). While the document that is known from his collection is not a precursor to the storyline and language of the Books of Mormon, which describe the migrations to the Americas of two groups of Jewish refugees (one from the destruction of Jerusalem in the time of Nebuchadnezzar and a later one in the 2nd century BCE persecution of the Jews by Antiochus Epiphanius). The first group mainly apostatized and survived as evil "Lamanites" (dark skinned Native Americans). The latter group also died out, but not before Jesus visited them and predicted the coming of the Europeans.

The surviving Spaulding story manuscript, datable to around 1812-1813 and describes the finding of an Latin manuscript that describes the escapades of a party of Romans who get lost at sea on the way to Britain and end up in America, making their last stand against savage native Indian 'empires' in Conneaut, Ohio. This is prefaced by a story of how the Latin manuscript was discovered in a hidden compartment in the rocks, a story that is uncannily similar to the compartment in which Joseph Smith says he found the gold and brass plates written in "reformed" Egyptian Heiroglyphics, except that Smith is directed to the site by the angel Moroni, not a knowledge of classical Roman fort building.

Them angels, ahhhh. Nuff rambling ...

DCH

sotto voce

Not a bit. That is precisely what it is, and it's not a fit subject for scholars. Mormonism is mind-bogglingly naff, for simpletons, who will believe anything at all. It's a joke, that would never have been taken seriously in Europe, or anywhere in the whole cosmos, but the USA, with its then large constituency of dim-witted, coarse, uncouth, licentious and ignorant people, who would believe any cockamamie idea, especially if it got them out of anything recognisably Bible-based and therefore morally challenging. Comparison with evangelicalism or Judaism is itself far too farcical for scholarly comment. No doubt there are those who find the notion that L-DS is Catholicism recycled uncomfortable, because Mormons have always liked to be thought to be closer to Protestantism than Catholicism, but that is another of their endless supply of falsehoods.

"Only in America."

ideologyhunter

The fact that Smith grew up in the 'burnt-over district' shows only how opportune the time & place was for a con artist to set up shop. Easier to find loons like Martin Harris to front you money and easier to assemble a group of followers. Again, if the historical/archaeological record of central America shows no evidence of the Hebrew civilization claimed in the BOM, not an inscription, not a coin, not a Jewish temple; if the Book of Abraham has no connection to the hierogyphics in the Joseph Smith Papyri -- then what we have in J. Smith is exactly what the Bainbridge, New York, court found him to be -- a charlatan, a con man. He simply improved his act and put a religious gloss on it, as his next creation.
Another fascinating story about Smith and deception is the saga of the Kinderhook Plates. It's not as damaging to Mormonism as the Book of Abraham, because Mormons canonized the latter book. But they put a credulous account of the Kinderhook Plates in their History of the Church, so it tells a lot about Smith and his ability to hoodwink his brethren. He was an incredibly successful con man until his ego got the better of him.

steve_bnk

From what I read until the Great Awakening Chistianity was on the decline. There was a gathering in which people had visions and the like. It was a turning point.

What I said was Smith grew up in a superstitious culture in a superstitious family to begin with. Not much different than the ancient Jews which gave birth to Chistianity.

Back in the 70s I read Marjoe Gortner's book. His parents were wandering preachers. As a kid he was taught to recite visions and make prohesies. He was a sensatiion on the revival circuits. Hisparents sewed deep pockets in his pants, he'd walk thru the crowds with people stuffing money in his pockets. That was a con.

Whether Smith was just a con artist or not is open to debate, I think he was probably a believer. A

A few yearago I was invited to attend a weekly private evangelical meeting that took place at a home. People sang, had visions, laid hands, read from scripture, and interpreted. They are true believers. They believe in faith healing.

Smith was immersed in that environment. Was he a con artist, or schitzophrenic mystic who had visions of god talking to him? Who knows. Whatever it was, the enviroment was ripe for a mystic to cteate a religion and attract followers. Same process that gave rise to Christianity. It is not about the specifics of the teachings or scriptures.