World Famous Cults and Fanatics (12 page)

In the spring of 1820, after reading a passage in the
Epistle of James
which declared that those in perplexity should ask God, he went into a grove of trees to pray.
There he had a
revelation – a pillar of light descended, in which he saw two men; one of these pointed to the other and said: “This is my beloved son.
Hear him!”
Smith then asked God which sect
he ought to join, and was told: “None of them.”
They were all wrong, and all creeds were an abomination in His sight.
When Joseph came to his senses he was Jying on his back.
Back at
home he told his mother that he had just learned that Presbyterianism was not true.

The revelation had no profound effect on him, and he later admitted that he continued to enjoy “jovial company” and to behave in a way that was not suitable for one who had been
“called of God”.

Three and a half years later, on 21 September 1823, Joseph was saying his prayers in bed when the light appeared again, and he saw a man dressed in a white robe “whose feet did not touch
the floor”.
The visitor explained that he was an angel called Moroni, who went on to talk at length about the scriptures, then told Joseph that he had written a history of the ancient
inhabitants of America on plates of gold.
After this, Moroni ascended to heaven in a shaft of light.
A few minutes later he reappeared, and repeated everything he had just said, then vanished as
before.
Soon he was back again, repeating it yet again.
The next day, he reappeared as Joseph (in a state of understandable fatigue) was crossing a field, and described where the plates were to be
found.

Obeying his instructions, Joseph went to a hill called Cumorah, about four miles away.
On the top, he found a large stone; which he levered up with a pole.
In the hole underneath was a box, and
in this he found some gold plates, a breastplate, and a pair of silver spectacles – which Moroni had called Urim and Thummim – and which would enable him to translate the words on the
gold plates.

Smith was not allowed to take them yet.
The angel showed him a vision of the heavens, and also of the Prince of Darkness and his legions, then explained that Joseph must spend four years of
preparation in order to become worthy of translating the plates.

A Mormon gathering in Salt Lake City

In 1827, Smith was finally allowed to take the gold plates away with him.
He carried them home in a borrowed buggy, but seems to have showed them to no one, not even his wife Emma, who went with
him to collect them.
Two months later, with fifty dollars presented by his first disciple, a farmer called Martin Harris, Smith and his wife went to Harmony, Pennsylvania, and there Joseph settled
down to translating the plates with the aid of the silver spectacles.
He did this behind a screen, so that no one actuallly saw the plates.
Martin Harris called at some point, and took away a piece
of paper with a transcription of some of the characters on it – they were apparently in a script called “reformed Egyptian” – and showed them to a New York professor named
Anton, who gave him a certificate saying that the characters were genuine.
But when he heard that they had been obtained from an angel Anton tore up his certificate.

The Book of Mormon

So
The Book of Mormon
came into existence.
It told how America had been originally settled by people from the Tower of Babel in the fifth century
AD
.
These
settlers gradually degenerated into men of violence.
Eleven hundred years later, more settlers arrived in Chile, including four brothers.
From one of the brothers, who was fair, descended a white
race, the Nephites; from the other three, who were dark, descended the Indians (or Lamanites).
After his death on the cross, Jesus Christ appeared in America and preached the gospel.
And in
AD
385, after the Nephites were almost wiped out by the Lamanites near the Hill Cumorah, their prophet Mormon wrote the history, which was then buried in the hill.

Martin Harris mortgaged his farm to provide the cash for publication, and
The Book of Mormon
appeared in 1830.
Meanwhile, the gold plates had been returned to the angel Moroni, no one but
Smith having even glimpsed them, although a young schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery helped with the translation from the other side of the screen.
The first 116 pages of the manuscript had already
been lost when Martin Harris’s indignant wife threw them on the fire.

Reviews of the book were contemptuous; no one had any doubt that Smith was a confidence trickster who had invented the whole story.
But the critiques at least aroused curiosity, and Smith soon
began to accumulate followers.
He also began to accumulate enemies, and decided to move to some less hostile state.
The Latter Day Saints – as the Mormons now called themselves –
decided to move west.
The “missionaries” had already established a church in Kirtland, Ohio.
There Smith received a revelation that declared that all members of the Church should deed
their property to the community, and a bishop would give each family back what he felt they required.
As with John of Leyden, it was a kind of Communism in practice.

Problems arose.
The citizens of Kirtland objected to the Saints as the citizens of Munster had objected to the Anabaptists.
In 1836, the Saints established their own bank and printed their own
money; in 1837, it collapsed, causing much hardship; five of Smith’s twelve “apostles” denounced him as a fallen prophet, and left.
Smith saw it all as a test of the faithful.

Other Saints had already established themselves in Missouri; Smith joined them there.
By now even Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery had left in disillusionment.
When angry mobs drove the Mormons
out of Missouri – after Smith had spent several months in jail – they moved on ‘to found the town of Nauvoo in Illinois.
But Illinois’s inhabitants proved to be as hostile
as those of Missouri.
Smith may have made things worse in July 1843 by publishing a document declaring that God had ordained polygamy, or “plural marriage” – although at this
stage it was not openly announced.
(Smith himself must have been practising plural marriage long before he announced its legality, for he seems to have married at least twenty-seven women, and
possibly as many as forty-eight.) Finally, a dispute with the governor became so bitter that, early in 1844, Smith decided it was time to go further west to found a City of the Saints.

Governor Ford was worried as the surrounding communities armed themselves and talked about massacring the Saints.
In June, Smith and his associates – including his brother Hyrum –
were charged with “riot”.
Convinced that he would be killed, he decided to flee, but then changed his mind and returned to give himself up.
This seemed to defuse the threatened
violence, and Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and two followers were lodged in Carthage jail.

On 27 June 1844, at four in the afternoon, a hundred men rushed the jail.
Governor Ford had marched his forces off to Nauvoo to restore order, and there were only eight men in charge of the
prisoners.
Hyrum was shot by a bullet that came through the window, and collapsed on the floor.
Joseph Smith opened the door and emptied his six-shooter into the mob.
Then the attackers flung open
the door and began shooting.
One of the disciples, John Taylor, tried to jump out of the window, but was hit by a bullet.
Joseph Smith attempted to leave the same way, and was hit several times; he
fell out of the window, twenty feet from the ground.
Staring out of the window after him, the other disciple, Willard Richards, saw that he seemed to be dead.

A cry of “The Mormons are coming” caused the crowd to scatter, and Taylor and Richards managed to take refuge in a safer part of the jail.
In fact, no Mormons were coming.
But since
Joseph Smith and his brother were now dead, the crowd dispersed.

It was left to Smith’s chief lieutenant, Brigham Young, to lead the Saints on their great trek westward, to the place where, in 1847, they founded Salt Lake City.
With tremendous energy
they irrigated the desert, and arranged the transportation of thousands of converts from Europe.
(The Mormons always attached great importance to proselytizing.) When Young announced the doctrine
of polygamy in 1852, he was deprived of the governorship of the territory.
“Plural marriage” was finally disowned by the Church in 1890, but when Young died in 1877 he had seventeen
wives and fifty-six children.

Mormonism – as can be seen – always aroused fierce opposition.
As early as 1834, E.
D.
Howe, an investigative journalist of the period, published a collection of affidavits from
friends and neighbours of Smith who described him as a lazy and mendacious religious conman.
Another investigator discovered a novel by the Reverend Simon Spalding that was alleged to be the true
source of
The Book of Mormon.
In the mid-1920s, Brigham H.
Roberts, the official historian of the Mormon Church, appealed to Church leaders to “help him resolve problems” about
The Book of Mormon,
one of which was that it contained so many similarities to a book called
A View of the Hebrews
published in 1823 by the Reverend Ethan Smith.
Another problem was
that
The Book of Mormon
refers to the ancient Hebrews’ use of steel, and to domestic animals that were unknown in ancient times.
Referring to many similar discrepancies, Roberts
concluded: “The evidence, I sorrowfully submit, points to Joseph Smith as their creator.”
Whether or not this is true, Smith remains one of the most charismatic and influential messiahs
of the nineteenth century.

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