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Mormon Church still has strong political influence in the state
of Utah in the U.S.A. It owns the second largest financial
institution west of the Mississippi, ‘The Beneficial Life
Insurance Company’, has enormous land holdings, as well as a
controlling interest in the Los Angeles Times. It is very
missionary orientated and encourages its most promising young
people to dedicate two years of their lives to missionary work
on a self-supporting basis. These young people are always well
dressed, polite, and provide a very wholesome image. This cult
is unusual in that it does not try to keep its people in
ignorance, but actively encourages education, especially
university and college qualifications.
1. HISTORY
Joseph Smith Jr. (b. 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, U.S.A.), founded
the Mormon Church. In 1817 his parents moved the family to
Rochester in New York State and there most of them joined the
local Presbyterian Church. Smith was undecided about which
denomination to join – an indecision that became the basis of
his future church. He claimed to receive a number of visions.
The first, apparently, was in 1820 when he was told not to join
any denomination, as they were all evil.
In 1823 he claimed that the angel
Moroni informed him of buried golden plates, and in 1827 he was
granted permission to dig them up. He then claimed to have
translated those inscriptions (supposedly written in ‘Reformed
Egyptian’), and then published the results in 1830. An angel
then removed the plates! This unlikely episode is made even less
credible by the fact that there were no reliable witnesses to
verify the existence of such plates.
April 6th, 1830, marked
the official organizing of ‘the Church of Christ’ at
Fayette, New York, with an initial membership of six. Membership
grew and many moved west to Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith
supervised the first printing of his divine revelations. This
book was originally entitled ‘Book of Commandments’, but has
since undergone many significant changes and is now called ‘Doctrines
and Covenants’. Following persecution Smith was imprisoned. He
managed to escape and lead his followers to Nauvoo, Illinois,
where he organized a small army and designated himself as
Lieutenant General. His followers built a temple and attempted
to gain new members for their church. However, Smith and his
followers found themselves criticized in the pages of the local
newspaper, The Nauvoo Expositor, and they attacked and
destroyed the presses and burnt copy. These actions led to the
arrest and imprisonment of Smith and though briefly released, he
was rearrested and jailed at Carthage, Illinois. He was killed
when a mob stormed the prison on June 27th, 1844. Thus, the
founder and prophet of the movement had been lost, but his
martyrdom ensured his revered place in Mormon history.
Smith’s successor was Brigham
Young, who became president of the ‘Twelve Apostles’, with
most followers accepting his leadership. To escape the continued
persecution he led the great trek westward in 1847 to Salt Lake
Valley. This was established as Mormon headquarters, and
occupies that position to this day. Young had a great influence
on the development of Mormonism but was also a ruthless leader.
He it was who ordered the ‘Mountain Meadow Massacre’ of 100
non-Mormons, an episode that is a severe embarrassment to modern
Mormons. Membership had risen to 150,000 by 1877 when Young
died, and numbers have continued to grow. Today the organization
claims well over five million adherents.
A rival organization was
founded, and set up headquarters in Wisconsin, in 1853. This
minority has stayed loyal to the Smith family, maintaining that
Joseph’s son was the only true and rightful successor. The
organization is known as ‘The Reformed Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints’, and refused to be termed ‘Mormon’,
but with over 200,000 members has not thrived like the parent
church. However, it is an irritant to the Mormon Church.
2. CLAIMS
Mormons believe that they are the restoration of the true church
established by Jesus Christ and that all other churches and
denominations are both wrong and evil. They use four books as
the basis of their authority.
passages have been added
and others removed, especially by the Catholic Church. Thus,
they do not really trust the Bible, and place much more faith in
the three other books.
2 The Book of Mormon: they
believe that God inspired this book and that it is a purported
history of two great civilizations in America. The original
author of the book was supposedly the prophet Mormon.
3 Doctrines and Covenants: this
gives 136 revelations outlining distinctive Mormon doctrine,
including baptism for the dead and celestial marriage.
4 The Pearl of Great Price:
which contains:
a The Book of Moses: which is equivalent to the first six
chapters of Genesis.
b The Book of Abraham: which is a claimed translation from
Egyptian papyrus and has been proved fraudulent.
c A History of Joseph Smith.
d Articles of Faith.
3. BELIEFS AND PRACTICES
Mormons do not believe in just one God. They deny the deity of
Christ and hence the Trinity. They deny the doctrine of hell and
punishment, and seem to believe that salvation is for everyone.
i God: they view God in a
number of ways.
a Polytheistic: they accept many gods. ‘In the beginning the
head of the Gods called a council of the Gods’. (Joseph Smith)
b An Exalted Man: they accept that God was once a man. ‘God
was once as we are now, and is an exalted man’. (Joseph
Smith)
c Physical: ‘The Father has a body of flesh and bone as
tangible as man’s’. (Joseph Smith)
ii Jesus Christ: they claim
that Jesus is not the unique Son of God, only being different
from other men because He became the firstborn of God’s ‘spirit
children’.
iii Man: they believe that man
is a pre-existent soul, who takes his body at birth.
iv Salvation: they claim that
everyone goes to one of three levels of glory:
a. The Celestial Kingdom: this is reserved for the Melchizedek
priesthood, and consists of members who will become gods. (There
is a tone of blasphemy to this claim). This is the highest of
the three heavens in Mormon teaching.
b. The Terrestrial Kingdom: this is reserved for those who
failed the requirements of exaltation to the Celestial Kingdom.
c. The Telestial Kingdom: reserved for those who have no belief
in Christ or the Gospel.
v. Polygamy: this is the belief
in the doctrine of plural marriages, namely that, a man may have
many wives. This belief and practice led to some of the early
persecution of Mormonism. Brigham Young’s polygamy is
recounted in a book by his twenty-seventh wife.
vi. Racism: Mormons relegate
black people and Indians into a class of their own. Such people
cannot become priests and very little work is done among them to
draw them in as members of the church. Thus, very real
discrimination has been practised against black people. In the
‘Pearl of Great Price’ Joseph Smith wrote, ‘For behold the
Lord shall curse the land with much heat, and the barrenness
thereof shall go forth forever; and there was a blackness come
upon all the children of Canaan, that they were despised . . .
for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them’.
Thus, historically, Mormonism has not looked favourable upon
black people. In the present climate of civil rights and
anti-racism it seems that this policy has, at least officially,
been changed.
NOTE ON THE BOOK OF MORMON
This book gives a very definite
account of the origin of the American Indians and how they came
to live in the Western Hemisphere. It was supposedly translated
from ‘Reformed Egyptian’ and is very much revered by present
day Mormons. Yet, it has been scrutinized by academics and been
severely critiqued. ‘The book is untrue biblically,
historically and scientifically,’ (William Duncan Strong,
Columbia University). Essentially, there is no evidence
archaeological, linguistic or historical to support the accounts
contained in the Book of Mormon. No names, cities, persons,
nations or places mentioned in the book have ever been found or
identified. Also, no genuine Egyptian inscriptions have ever
been found in America, and nothing has been remotely similar to
Smith’s ‘Reformed Egyptian’. There is no such language.
False Prophecy
Joseph Smith claimed that the
Lord told him that the ‘saints’ would build a temple in
Zion, Jackson County, Missouri, during his generation, and that
Zion would never be removed from its place. ‘This generation
shall not all pass away until an house shall be built unto the
Lord…upon the consecrated spot as I have appointed’,
(Doctrine and Covenants). These prophecies failed since a temple
was never built at the appointed place. Moreover, two weeks
before Smith gave the prophecy that Zion would not be ‘moved
out of her place’ the Mormons were unceremoniously run out of
Zion, their printing presses were destroyed and some of their
leaders were tarred and feathered. Smith was in Kirtland, Ohio
at the time and so was uninformed of the situation in Jackson
County when he gave his prophetic statement. The Bible says, ‘When
a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow
not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not
spoken, but the prophet has spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt
not be afraid of him’. Deut. 18. 22. Clearly, in the light of
such a biblical statement, Joseph Smith must be classified as a
false prophet and therefore the Mormon faith is founded on
falsehood and must be described as a false religion.
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