Politics

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At a time when a prominent wealthy Mormon politician is very close to being nominated by the Republican Party to run against Barack Obama in the November 2012 General Election, many of the electorate want to know whether Mitt Romney is really a Christian, and whether Mormonism is really a Christian religion, according to the Bible. So here I am, ready and willing to enter into the fray. As a person who converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) over 40 years ago at the tender impressionable age of twenty, I believe that I am fully qualified, as an expert, to render an opinion as to whether Mormonism is tantamount to Christianity.

After baptism and confirmation into the Mormon Church, I voraciously read all of the Mormon scriptures numerous times, absorbed and believed everything I was told by my Mormon Priesthood leaders about 19th and 20th Century Mormon theology and history, and held many positions, referred to in Mormon circles as callings, in the many Mormon group, branch, ward, and stake congregational organizations in which I was identified as an active member over a 30 year period of time. I was regularly ordained to the offices of the Mormon Aaronic Priesthood (deacon, teacher, and priest) and, in 1972, was ordained to the Mormon Melchizadek Priesthood, to the office of a Mormon elder. In 1974, I was married in the Salt Lake Mormon Temple, and subsequently returned to the Los Angeles Mormon Temple over 500 times, over 27 years of active Mormon Church affiliation, to perform the many of the various vacarious ordinances regarded by the Mormon Church as essential for the dead to have, what they call, eternal exaltation. For the bulk of the 25 active years I actively served in the Mormon Church, I spent most of my time performing missionary work, that is preaching the Mormon gospel to non-Mormons and baptizing those people into Mormonism.

During those 25 years, especially in the first five years of my Mormon experience, I was explicitly told by my Priesthood superiors, in the various LDS wards and stakes where I resided, not to read any material published by non-Mormons or ex-Mormons concerning Mormon theology and history. At that time, during the 1970s and 80s, such printed material, regarded mostly as heresy by the Mormon Church, was only available in small quantities in city and university librarires and Christian bookstores. The newly baptized members of the Mormon Church weren't able to find any such books written by non-Mormons and ex-Mormons in the ward and stake libraries. If they wanted to peruse objective and comparative theological materials about Mormonism, it was necessary for them to go inconveniently out of their way to find those materials; and if they were found reading them by their Mormon overseers, they, in most cases, were severely admonshed. During the 1980s, quite a few active prominent Mormons were actually excommunicated by the Utah Church for writing, and publishing, truthful facts and documents about 19th Century Mormon theology and history, which were regarded as heresy by the Mormon prophet and apostles.

So, are Mormons really Christians? Do they believe in the same Jesus that the people of the Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Catholic, Disciples of Christ, and the other traditional Christian denominations regard as the Savior and Redeemer of the world, and the Son of God? If these two questions had been asked of me in my 29th year of Mormon activity, I would have probably answered yes to both of them. But in my 30th year, I was challenged by a good non-Mormon friend to, for once in my life, be objective about the Mormon Church, and began, abruptly, to read and study materials written and published by some prominent non-Mormon, and formerly Mormon, scholars, who had thoroughly researched 19th and 20th Century Mormon theology and history. From these well documented sources of information I began to clearly see some very poignant and disturbing theological and historical issues, issues that I had formerly presumed were biased, untruthful, and heretical to the Latter-day Saint version of Christianity. Moreover, I began reading and studying the original, and official, Mormon sources on which these non-Mormon scholars had based their critical findings and conclusions. These sources were 19th Century books, official Mormon Church records, sermons, and treatises by Mormon apostles and prophets about which I had never known.

You see, a Mormon's belief in the "Book of Mormon" to be the word of God, and much more correct than the Bible, emanates from a personal belief that Joseph Smith, Jr. was a true living prophet of God. The Mormon reasoning, though quite fallacious, is that, if Smith was a prophet, everything he did and said, in God's name, was divinely inspired. Quite a few adult investigators of Mormonism go beyond what they are only advised to read and study by the full-time and ward missionaries, who present Mormonism to them in six-or-more formatted lessons. There are approximately 55,000 full-time Mormon missionaries regularly maintained throughout the world, sent out by the Salt Lake Church headquarters to baptize people into the Mormon Church.

Currently, though, when Mormon investigators do their own research about Mormonism, most of them decline membership in the Mormon Church. Now that the Internet offers the same information about Mormon theology and history that was once only obtainable in libraries, more than half of all of the Americans who are contacted by Mormon missionaries decline membership in the Mormon Church after the first formal lesson. These adults can sit in their homes, at their desks, and discover the bare-bone facts about Mormonism that, at one time, was out of reach for most people. What are some of these very poignant facts?

1. Regardless of what loyal Mormons will tell you, the Mormon Church has officially believed and maintained, since 1842, that Jesus of Nazareth was not born of a virgin. By all appearances at Christmas-time, it would seem that the Mormons are traditionally Christian. Yet, they officially maintain, in their official doctrine, that a resurrected Father in Heaven, a glorified man with a glorified body of flesh and bones, came to Mary the mother of Jesus, and had sexual intercourse with her. They do not believe the New Testament account of the virgin birth, that the Holy Ghost came upon Mary, and that the power of the most high overshadowed her.
2. For 40 years, from around 1855 until around 1892, the Mormon Church taught in their temples that Adam (of the Garden of Eden) was the Heavenly Father who had impregnated Mary, the mother of Jesus, and that Eve was the Heavenly Mother who had conceived all of the spirits of all the mortal humans who would inhabit the earth. Adam was considered the father of Jesus Christ. Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Mormon Church, produced this particular doctrine and placed it into written Mormon temple liturgy in 1877. Even though the Mormon Church's Prophet Spencer W. Kimball officially discounted, in a 1985 General Conference, what was once to them the sacred Adam-God Doctrine, and called its unnamed originator (Brigham Young) a damnable heretic, the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young is still regarded by the Church as a holy man of God. These are true incontrovertible facts that most loyal Mormons will try to dispute, but a proper rendering of Mormon doctrinal history will bear them out.

3. Mormons believe, as doctrine, that the atonement and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the shedding of his blood as a perfect sacrifice, did not atone for 'all' of man's sins. During the 19th Century, in the Salt Lake, Utah Valley, Brigham Young instituted what he called "blood atonement" for sins such as murder, rape, incest, adultery, and saying evil things about the Mormon apostles and prophets. This mean't that those who were convicted of such sins and crimes had to have their own blood shed to atone for their sins. This is why Brigham Young, as Territorial Governor of Utah, imposed the firing squad as a means of execution, instead of hanging, and the required blood penalty remains unto the present day for capital crimes. Such capitol crimes (sins) were only punishable by having the person's blood shed. This is another prime difference between the Jesus of the Bible and the Jesus of Mormondom.

4. The Mormon temple rite currently practiced in Mormon temples around the world began in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1842, and has changed dramatically since it was first established by Joseph Smith, Jr. as a severe modification of the Masonic temple rite. In 1976, the Mormon temple rite, called the Endowment, included blood oaths taken by each participating Mormon concerning the secrecy of the signs and tokens of the two Mormon priesthoods, the Aaronic and Melchizadek, which directly reflected the symbolism of the Masonic oaths of secrecy. From 1842 until around 1983, these blood oaths were regarded as essential to the Endowment. Each Mormon elder who currently receives his endowment is ordained, during the endowment, to one day be a god (if he proves to be worthy), to be given his own earth on which to procreate spirit children, and to spiritually procreate another savior for his own world (another Jesus Christ). Satan, the devil, has always been regarded by Mormon theology as the spiritual brother of Jesus Christ, and each potential Mormon god will also procreate a Satan, or devil. This is another very great difference between the Jesus of the Bible worshipped by traditional Christianity, and the Jesus of Mormonism. The people procreated by this new Mormon god (the Mormon elder who makes it to godhood) will one day be regarded as a supreme god, God, with a capital 'G.'

5. Faithful Mormons, who are surprisingly well-educated people, believe and maintain that great herds of horses roamed the American continent 600 years before the birth of Christ. This is what the "Book of Mormon" states as a fact, which is directly opposed to proven historical and paleontological fact. Mormons also believe that the American Indians, the Native Americans, are Hebrew by blood lineage, which contradicts the anthropological research that has shown that the North and South American Indians came from a stock of people that migrated across the Bering Strait land bridge into North America around nine-thousand years ago. 19th and 20th Century Mormon prophets have told thousands of South American, and Central American, Indians that the blood of Abraham and Lehi, the father of the resurrected angel who supposedly appeared to Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1824, flows in their veins.

6. Faithful Mormons believe and maintain that two great conflicting "Book of Mormon" civilizations, the Nephites and the Lamanites, built great sophisticated cities, had populations of millions of inhabitants, and fought each other in great battles using swords and other weapons made of fine forged steel. Yet, not one artifact has been discovered in Central or South America, to date, in order to document the results of such thriving ancient civilizations. Mormons also believe that the last great battle between the Nephites and Lamanites, killing millions, occurred near Palmyra, New York on a grassy hill called the Hill Cumorah, even though modern Mormon scholars have asserted that Central America was the area for Nephite and Lamanite development and demise.

7. In 1998, a formal DNA study was undertaken by Brigham Young University using 5,000 native-Peruvian Indians to determine accurate genetic ancestry, and to attempt to prove the correctness of the 'Book of Mormon.' The study was funded by a wealthy Arizona Mormon, James Ferguson, who wanted to get to the truth of the issue. The results of the study were hardly publicized, but 98 percent of the Peruvians tested were of Mongolian ancestry, and 2 percent were of European ancestry. The Mormon Church regularly accepts the results of DNA testing for genealogical verification, but has officially denied the results of the 1998 BYU DNA testing, which proved that Native Americans do not have Hebrew ancestry. These are incontrovertible facts.

8. In 1833, the Mormon Church, under the direction of Joseph Smith, Jr., compiled a book of revelations received by Smith, supposedly from God (in addition to the Book of Mormon), entitled it the 'Book of Commandments,' and prepared for its publication. The book, in its Chapter 24 (written by Joseph in June 1830) does not mention anything at all about the high Mormon Priesthood that suddenly appeared in the Church hierarchy in 1832. Only a few copies of the 'Book of Commandments' was printed, and in 1835 Joseph Smith altered each, and every, revelation (chapter) that he had formerly claimed that he had received from God, which had been compiled in the 'Book of Commandments,' and created a new book called the 'Doctrine and Covenants,' which included a high priesthood, and the specific offices of high priest and seventy not mentioned in the original Mormon revelations.

David Whitmer, one of the three original witnesses to the golden plates, from which Smith supposedly translated the 'Book of Mormon,' left the Mormon Church disgusted that a man named Sidney Rigdon, a close associate of Joseph Smith, Jr., had concocted the idea about a high priesthood on his own, in 1832, after Smith had said that the 'Book of Mormon' was going to be the sole basis of Mormon doctrine.

Interestingly, the 'Book of Mormon' mentions nothing at all about divisions of a high, and lesser, priesthood, and about many other aspects of Mormon doctrine that Smith claimed were eternal, and had been around since, and before, Adam. In fact, on its title page, Joseph Smith called the 'Book of Mormon' the fulfillment of the everlasting gospel and the most correct book on the face of the earth. Though Smith made this assertion, the 'Book of Mormon' has undergone six editions comprising over 4,000 emendations of its original 1830 publication text, emendations regarding grammar, punctuation, syntax, sentence structure, and contextual meaning of words and phrases. These facts are true and incontrovertible.

9. As Mormonism is debated in the minds of the traditional Christians comprising a significant portion of the electorate, the history of Joseph Smith's, and the present-day Mormon Church's, political ambitions and agendas should be relevant and factual food for thought. Faithful Mormons, such as the sensational Mormon elder and pundit Glenn Beck, don't particularly want the political history of the Mormon Church to be publicized before the electorate, even if it is the sad truth. They only want certain generalized aspects of Mormonism conveyed to the public eye, the, supposedly, positive aspects. But I think differently. If the practice of a religion by elected federal officers poses a threat to the Republic, in any way, that threat should be closely scrutinized by the electorate.

So, I will begin this nineth aspect of Mormonism by saying that Joseph Smith was greatly influenced by his brother Hyrum to become involved with the Masonic order when he was around thirty-five. Hyrum Smith was a practicing Mason during the years that Joseph was producing the 'Book of Mormon,' and Joseph was greatly influenced by the politics of Masonry, which showed prominently in the 'Book of Ether' of the 'Book of Mormon,' written by Smith between 1820 and 1830. In that section of the 'Book of Mormon,' he detailed certain secret combinations of evil conspiring people, the most evil being called Master Mahan (Mason?). In the late-1820s, the killing of a certain prominent Mason, a Captain Morgan, by Masonic ritual created a poignant stir among the New England public about the secret blood-ritual practices of Masonry. Smith, then a much younger person, apparently reflected this denigration of Masonry in the 'Book of Mormon,' but, later, extolled the same practices in his contrived Mormon temple rite during the early 1840s.

10. Much ado has been made in the news about the Mormon Church being a world-wide church of color, and that many black people have joined Church since 1978. Most of these black folks who have entered the Church don't, however, realize that, prior to 1978, the Mormon Church had a department in its Salt Lake organization called the 'racial purity research division.' This department of genealogical research comprised about 150 church employees who spent all their time determining if any member with a questionable dark complexion had any black racial history. Black people could be baptized into the Mormon Church, from 1830 until 1978, but they couldn't receive the Mormon temple Endowment because black men were regarded as ineligible to receive the high Mormon Priesthood. This was, supposedly, because of a curse that had been placed on Cain by God for killing his brother Abel. In 1978, Mormon Prophet Spencer W. Kimball made it seem in his declaration, or manifesto, that other races of people, besides the blacks, were kept from obtaining the Mormon Priesthood, but this was not so. It was actually a matter of skin color instead of verifiable race, because the Austrialian Aboriginees were also denied the Mormon Preisthood. Prior to 1978, all other races of people with dark-brown and yellow skins were allowed to receive the Mormon Priesthood, but if person had any degree of Negroid appearance, they were denied the Priesthood until the racial purity department in Salt Lake City cleared their genealogy. As a Mormon missionary, I taught several black families during the 1980s, and was explicitly instructed by ward and stake mission leaders not to mention any pre-1978 history to any of the black people taught by the Mormon missionaries. The full-time Mormon missionaries were given the same instructions. These are true incontrovertible facts.

11. The political aspirations of Joseph Smith, Jr., and the Mormon Church, began after his Mormon city, Nauvoo, was built on the Mississippi River in Illinois in 1841. The city was built and organized as a theocracy, with Joseph Smith, the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, holding the positions of mayor and commanding general of the 2,000 man Nauvoo Legion, the largest private army in the United States. At the time of Smith's death by lynching, in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1944, Joseph claimed that he was ruling Nauvoo as a direct representative of God on the earth. In 1843, Joseph Smith boldly declared himself a candidate for U.S. President for the 1844 General Election, and sent his twelve apostles, and his other representatives, into different parts of the nation to campaign for him. At that time, Nauvoo was the largest city in Illinois, larger, even, than Chicago, and Smith was attracting great political interest from Illinois state government officers because of the Mormon-block vote. The many Mormon people of Nauvoo would vote as one, according to how Joseph Smith wanted them to vote.

Secretly, in 1843, Smith organized the 'Council of Fifty,' which was a group of fifty prominent and wealthy men, Mormon and non-Mormon, chosen by Smith to govern the United States as a political-theocratic kingdom of God after his election as U.S. President. In addition to his several other titles, Smith named himself 'King' over the Council of Fifty, or the political kingdom of God, and had all of the members of the Council to join together in his ordination. Smith had the arrogance to state that he was going to be elected overwhelmingly in the 1844 Presidential Election. When certain men, who opposed Smith's political ambitions, found out, in early 1844, about the 'Council of Fifty,' and about the fact that Smith, and certain select apostles, were secretly practicing polygamy (plural marriage) in Nauvoo, they organized a newspaper, called the 'Nauvoo Expositer,' and published the information to the citizens of Nauvoo.

Maddened by the public disclosure of his secret operations, Smith had the newspaper quickly destroyed and the publishers beaten and jailed. Subsequently, charges of treason were imposed against Joseph Smith, and his brother Hyrum, by the Governor of Illinois, which led to Smith's lynching while he was in the Carthage Jail in June 1844. Since Smith's demise, the ritual liturgy for ordaining any new Mormon prophet, succeeding a former prophet who died while serving in his office, includes being named President, Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and King over the Political Kingdom of God, which is regarded as the United States of America. The prophet's ordination is always done in secret in the Salt Lake Mormon Temple, and the 'official' statement given to the church membership is that the new prophet is formally ordained to be President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The fact that the new prophet is also ordained as a 'King' is not mentioned. The only reason that I know this to be a true fact is because a trusted friend, who, on July 7, 1972, happened to be in a unique position to see and hear the ordination of Apostle Harold B. Lee, who succeeded Mormon Prophet Joseph Fielding Smith. My friend was sworn to secrecy by the Mormon Church Security Service, but was very troubled by what he witnessed and revealed it to me, and several others, as a matter of conscience. If my friend had publicly revealed what he told me, there's no telling what might have happened to him. Though the foregoing facts are true, most loyal Mormons will dispute them.

The foregoing eleven aspects of Mormonism are not the only indications of the religion's secular origins, and its far separation from traditional Christianity, but they comprise the most devastating evidence that the Jesus Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, and the other practicing Mormons in the federal political limelight worship is not the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Holy Bible. Mitt Romney, a former Mormon bishop (an overseer of one Mormon ward or congregation) and stake president (an overseer of several Mormon wards), is the son of a Mormon elder, George Romney, who seriously endeavored to become a U.S. President at an earlier time in history. Romney and every other faithful Mormon elder seriously and faithfully believe that, if they are faithful to their covenants and obligations to the Mormon Church while mortals, they will be resurrected after death into the highest degree of Mormon exaltation, have celestial wives, become gods, and procreate spirit children. Then they will be given power, as Gods, to organize their own earths and to send their own spirit children to those earths to obtain physical bodies. Then these glorified immortal Mormons will be worshipped, everafter, as superior Gods. Mitt Romney must believe and maintain these doctrines in order to retain his standing in the Mormon Church

This basically un-Christian belief in a deified hereafter is, apparently, what drives Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, Glenn Beck, and every other faithful Mormon elder to dedicate and consecrate all of their talents and resources to the upbuilding of the Mormon Kingdom of God (the Mormon Church) while yet a mortal human being. Every time a Mormon elder returns to, and performs rites in, a Mormon temple, he recommits to this dedication and consecration in the Endowment ritual, while performing the Endowment rites for someone who has died. As far as the aforementioned ritual blood-oaths (made during the Endowment rite) are concerned, they were considered by the Mormon Church as sacred and indispensible from 1841 to around 1985. I had to swear the blood-oaths in 1976, when I was married in the Salt Lake Temple. Then, around 1985, they were suddenly expunged from the Endowment liturgy. In regard to this significant change in temple Endowment liturgy, one very disgruntled Mormon, who had disagreed with the removal of the blood oaths, sarcastically remarked, 'God sure changes his mind a lot about doctrines he supposedly gave to last forever.'

In sum, the Mormon Church is currently the wealthiest Church on the face of the earth and believes doctrinally that it is the only true Church on the earth with the authority to officially act for God. For nearly 170 years, the Mormon Church has asserted its self-claimed autonomy as God's only official representative ecclesiastical organization on the earth, and that the heavenly father of Mormonism is a glorified and exalted man, who procreated all of the spirits of all the people who have ever been on the earth. The Mormons believe that Jackson County, Missouri was the site of the Garden of Eden, and that when Jesus returns to the earth, it will be at Jackson County, Missouri, and that the current Mormon Prophet will be there to meet him and the resurrected Adam. As the wealthiest Church on earth, it exerts a great deal of power throughout the United States and the world.

In dollars and cents, the Mormon Church has a gross worth of nearly 100 billion dollars, and when the ecclesiastical part of the Church wants to get involved in a political controversy, all it has to do is declare the controversy a moral issue, and, immediately, money is diverted and channeled from the Mormon corporation (it owns over 90 commercial profit-making entities) tothe Church, or ecclesiastical element for that particular purpose. The common expression heard today in the central assemblies of the Mormon Church is, 'What is good for the Church is good for the nation.' This was the battle-cry in the Mormon effort to defeat the 'Equal Rights Amendment' in the late-1970s. Very few people knew, or know, that Sen. Orrin Hatch coordinated efforts with the Mormon Church during that very heated time when Utah and Idaho (the most populous Mormon states) defeated the ratification of the ERA. Since he was elected in 1977, Hatch has met regularly, every other week without exception, with all of the presiding Mormon Prophets since Spencer W. Kimball. Those have been Ezra T. Bensen and Gordon B. Hinckley. Currently, he meets with Prophet Thomas S. Monson every other week. In those meetings, Hatch ritually tells the prophet about everything he is doing, and the prophet tells him what he should, and should not, do. Is this governmentally problematic? I heard one very cynical ex-Mormon say, 'The Mormon Church wants to believe that it presides over everyone in the United States (and the world), whether or not those billions of people actually realize it.' In much the same way, the Mormons spend countless millions of dollars every year in genealogical research efforts, in order to perform vacarious ordinances in Mormon temples for millions of dead people whose living relatives have expressly told the Church not to do it. In other words, the Mormon Church ignores the requests of living non-Mormons to not do temple work for their ancestors. This has been the case with Jewish groups who have complained about the Mormons doing temple work for Holocaust victims.

Therefore, in order to answer the two very poignant questions that I posed at the beginning of this essay, I must say, first, that a significant number of the active rank-and-file convert members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don't realize the formal doctrines and history of the religion that occupies about 70-80 percent of their time. If they had realized the full extent of Mormonism at the time the Mormon missionaries had been teaching them, they probably would have declined baptism into the Mormon Church.

As far as the multi-generational true-blue Mormons are concerned, those Mormon adults who have large families and can trace their genealogy back to the Mormons at Nauvoo, the children of these Mormons don't have a chance to know the truth about Mormon doctrine and history until they get away from their very controlling parents. These life-long adult members, such as Mitt Romney, pretty much know about the facts I have mentioned in this essay, but have accepted the authority, life-style, and fellowship of Mormonism over biblical Christianity, and do something very inimical to basic morality. They "innocently" lie for the Lord, something I started refusing to do in my 30th year of Mormon membership. So, Mormonism is definitely not the same religion taught by Jesus Christ, and his apostles, in the Bible, and Mormons (Latter-day Saints), such as Mitt Romney, who declares that they are as much Christian as their Baptist or evangelical neighbor, are, either, ignorant of the facts and greatly in error, or are lying for the Lord.

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