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The Dark History Of Mormonism — From Child Brides To Mass Murder
The Dark History Of Mormonism — From Child Brides To Mass Murder
Source: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/dark-mormon-history
Despite what you may think, Mormon history is full of scandal, violence, and lies.
Polygamy has always been entrenched in Mormon history. Here is Polygamist Tom Green, 52, who, at one point, had five wives and 35 children.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was formally organized in New York in 1830 with the highest of goals: to teach and promote the Gospel of Jesus, with all the pacifism and general cheek-turning that should go along with that mission.
From the very start of Mormon history, however, LDS church members found themselves involved in one violent confrontation after another with their neighbors, whom they referred to as “gentiles.” It wasn’t long before the first church adherents had to move their group.
Conflict followed them along the way, some of it inflicted on them, some of it dished out by them until the church found its new home and grew its numbers until it dominated the land it occupied.
Even then, many of the darker impulses that drive men to the top of a religious hierarchy remained and found expression in official church policies that the modern LDS church is still trying to live down.
The Mormon Wars
This 1851 lithograph depicts one of the darker moments in Mormon history as Joseph Smith’s body is mutilated in the street.
Mormon history is largely a repeating pattern: LDS members form an insular community somewhere, buy and sell principally with each other and dominate the local economy and political scene, followed by harassment and violence from the area’s prior residents, leading to guerrilla warfare and the expulsion of the Mormons to a new territory, where it all started again.
After their trek out of New York, the Mormons settled in Jackson County, Mo., which their leader Joseph Smith had identified as the site of the new Zion, a “center place” he hoped to build before the imminent end of the world.
Jackson residents were understandably wary of this sudden influx of thousands, and by 1833 they had forced the expulsion of LDS members to areas farther east, near the center of the state. There, in 1838, trouble began again, as LDS members were heard speaking openly about “enemy” land coming under the control of their church and preaching sermons about “exterminating” gentiles occupying the Holy Land of Missouri.
Residents retaliated by putting a measure on the August ballot to prevent Mormons voting or owning land outside of Clay County. This led to a brawl at a polling station and multiple confrontations between Mormon and non-Mormon lynch mobs.
By the middle of October, as the state militia was threatening to defect and join a mob laying siege to Mormons in De Witt, an armed Mormon militia rode down on the militia’s camp and drove off the men, killing one. Hearing of this, and thinking he had an insurrection on his hands, Governor Boggs issued the infamous Executive Order 44, authorizing the militia to drive off or kill every Mormon in the state.
After five years of underground warfare, locals were happy to oblige, and most of the Mormons were driven across the river to a new New Zion, Nauvoo, Illinois.
Before 1839, Nauvoo was a big swampy marsh and a tiny town called Commerce. The sudden influx of over 10,000 Mormons made it the second-largest city in the state overnight. More migrants arrived in the next few years from a Mormon mission in Britain, swelling the town’s population further.
When the commander of the Illinois State Militia converted to Mormonism, he was put at the head of the 2,000-member Nauvoo Legion, an armed fighting force that answered to “Lieutenant-General” Joseph Smith. Smith was also the president of the LDS church, chief justice of the municipal courts, and mayor of Nauvoo.
That authoritarian streak alarmed non-Mormon residents of Hancock County, as did the by-now-typical Mormon domination of local politics and the economy. By 1844, things had gone south again.
Smith had been using his position at the head of Nauvoo’s courts to deny extradition for Mormons accused of crimes in Missouri, including possibly an attempt on the life of Governor Boggs. This was also the time when Smith introduced polygamy as an official church practice, leading to a schism that saw a splinter group founding a newspaper critical of Smith.
When Smith sent the Nauvoo Legion to shut down the paper, non-Mormons in the area got legitimately scared of his unchecked power. Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyram, were arrested and held under guard in Carthage, Illinois, where a lynch mob attacked the jail and killed them both.
Open violence broke out between Mormons and their neighbors, which came to be known as the Illinois Mormon War. In January of 1845, Nauvoo’s town charter was revoked by the state legislature, whereupon the new leader, Brigham Young, created an informal theocracy called the City of Joseph.
Fighting continued on and off throughout the year until Young personally negotiated a truce to allow his people to peaceably evacuate the city. By the winter of 1844-45, as many as 15,000 Mormons had packed up their goods and hit what became known as the Mormon Trail west, to parts unknown.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
Photo just before the execution of John D. Lee for his role in the Mountain Meadows massacre.
In the summer of 1857, a well-organized and equipped party under the command of Colonel Alexander Fancher set out from Arkansas for Southern California. Fancher had made this trip twice before, and he enjoyed a sterling reputation on the westward trails.
As planned, the Baker–Fancher party, as it was by then called, stopped for resupply at Salt Lake City before beginning the southward leg toward the Santa Fe Trail. Instead of being allowed to buy supplies in the city, as had always been done before, Fancher’s party was refused and sent away by hostile locals.
It was the 120 or so emigrants’ bad luck to arrive in Mormon country just as President Buchanan was threatening to invade to enforce federal law in the rogue territory. At this point in Mormon history, paranoia was high, and the church had been preaching doom at the hands of gentiles from the degenerate east. By all accounts, Fancher took the refusal in stride and led his party out of town in search of provender.
The later federal investigation ruled that members of the party had behaved courteously and well while in Deseret, which was to be expected for a group that may have been one-third children.
That courtesy mattered for nothing. Within days of leaving Salt Lake City, rumors were zipping up and down the trail about marauding gentiles looting farms and poisoning water supplies. The Nauvoo Legion, still intact from the Illinois War and loaded for bear, assembled under the command of William Dame and laid a trap for the party.
The mission seems not to have been authorized from the top – at least, Dame felt it was necessary to deflect blame for what he was going to do, so in a half-baked scheme to mislead investigators he formed a temporary alliance with a band of Southern Paiute and dressed his men in Native clothes.
They ambushed the party near Mountain Meadows and tried really hard to kill the emigrants without being spotted as white. This may have been the only time wagons actually circled for defense in the West, but the tactic worked and the quick ambush turned into a four-day siege.
Eventually, men of the Nauvoo Legion approached the settlers – who were dying of thirst – under a flag of truce and offered them protection “from the Indians” if they left immediately. The emigrants took him up on the offer, broke their camp, and were shot down as they filed past the Mormon militia.
In a final effort to cover up what he’d done, Dame ordered the killing by gun and Bowie knife of every emigrant over the age of seven. Seventeen children under that age were spared, to be adopted by local families.
The Civil War interrupted the federal investigation into what became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but in 1874 an extremely senior Mormon man named John Lee stood trial for the murder of the 120 emigrants. Lee was convicted and executed by firing squad in Utah. He was the only man judicially punished for the massacre.
A Lesson In Mormon History And Polygamy
Warren Jeffs is one of the most infamous individuals in Mormon History. Here is Jeffs with one of his child brides.
Polygamy had been one of the main wedges that split the congregation in Nauvoo. Like everything else in Mormon history and doctrine, this had been promulgated as a revelation to Joseph Smith from God, but it never rested easily with non-Mormons who saw it in practice.
Keeping multiple wives struck them as un-Christian, and polygamous groups tend to concentrate the supply of young wives toward the top, where middle-aged men lead families that sometimes number in the dozens of people. This leaves lots of unattached young men at the bottom, where they’re likely to cause trouble.
Those young wives are sometimes very young indeed. Several of Brigham Young’s 55 wives were as young as 15, and Joseph Smith’s 26th wife had been 14 at the time they were “sealed for eternity.” Many of the older wives of Mormon patriarchs were concurrently married to more than one living husband, which also struck onlookers as sacrilegious.
Hostility over this practice was a major driver of the Mormon expansion westward, as practitioners fled to the remote territory they called Deseret, where they could continue in peace. By the end of the 1880s, as it became obvious that Deseret was being organized into the State of Utah, then-Mormon President Woodruff had a revelation from God to abandon plural marriage “in obeyance to the law of the land.”
Not every Mormon accepted this revelation. To this day, several splinter factions operate more or less underground and hew close to the old ways. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ still exists, despite its leader, Warren Jeffs, being sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for sexual assault of two minors, one of whom was 11 when she was sealed to Jeffs, who was then 49 years old.
With an estimated 4,500 members, this is possibly the largest polygamous sect still in existence, but it is far from the last.
Utah officials estimate as many as 80 to 100,000 people currently belong to various polygamous groups around the state. Most of these consist of just one or a small number of families and difficult-to-verify stories abound about continued child marriage and incest, usually between first cousins.
It’s worth noting that the official LDS establishment vehemently denounces these groups and their practices, and bigamy is punished more severely in Utah than in most other states.
Despite this, because of the continuing tendency of Mormon groups to flood small towns and dominate local politics, some local law enforcement in places like Colorado City are suspected of turning a blind eye to their churches’ illegal activities.
Racism In The Church
Mormon high priest Douglas A. Wallace baptized and confirmed Larry Lester, first black ever ordained into priesthood of the Mormon Church. The ceremony, which took place in the Portland Motel pool, was declared ‘null and void’ by spokesman of the Church in Salt Lake City. April 02, 1976.
Today, The Mormon Church teaches that there is no distinction between races and that “all are alike unto God.” According to the Church, this is evident from even a cursory reading of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, which – again, according to the Church – have always viewed black and white men as equals.
That ineffable truth would come as a surprise to millions of LDS members who lived and died before 1978. Before this time, the church’s policy had always been to racially segregate its members and withhold priesthood membership from black adherents.
This policy essentially meant that nonwhites were locked out of almost every office and sacrament of the Church since virtually all of these require a male member to “hold priesthood” before he can move on to becoming a bishop, perform baptism, or bless the sick.
Black members were also not allowed to seal their marriages (that is, to become eternally bonded to their wives), or to be exalted. In other words, they could audit services, but not get too directly involved.
The justification for this goes back to the LDS Church’s early days. According to the Book of Mormon, which purports to be the history of a spiritual war between two groups of angels, the pre-born antecedents of today’s black people showed “insufficient valiance” in that war, and so Father God “cursed them with a sore cursing,” which would be that dark skin of theirs.
Meanwhile, the heroes of the story, the Nephites, were described as “exceedingly white and delightsome” to behold. White Mormons were supposed to be the descendants of these Nephites.
To be fair, black people interested in joining the Church were not entirely excluded. They were always allowed to attend church and study with missionaries. It was even taught that, after a certain number of generations in the faith, their “skin of blackness” would eventually fade due to good works, and their remote descendants would then be eligible to hold the priesthood.
This kind of talk went over well enough before the Civil War, when it could be argued that having black skin in America really was a sore cursing, and for the century or so after it. However, it began to wear a little thin by the Civil Rights Era, when Americans of every color started noticing how crazy-racist things were and resolving to change.
Like any church, the Mormon hierarchy at first resisted this sea change. In 1947, a statement from the First Presidency (which is basically binding, like a Mormon papal bull) reiterated the Church’s opposition to interracial marriage.
Later, in the 1960s, the Church fought a running war of words with the NAACP over whether it would support Utah’s civil rights laws.
Later still, the 13th First President of the Church – and Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture – Ezra Benson, spread around his opinion that the Civil Rights movement was nothing but a front for communist subversion of the United States.
All this came to a head in 1978, when President Spencer Kimball finally went on record renouncing what he called “folk beliefs” regarding race among his people. For the first time, black Mormons were allowed to participate in temple rights and marry each other for all eternity like proper Mormons – even if the spouse they were sealing to happened to be white.
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Originally Posted by Dorian
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