God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - 3

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Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion

Christopher Hitchens

Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET

 

 

If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any

future " revelations " after the immaculate conception of the Koran,

they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world's

fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they,

mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would

model himself on theirs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by a gifted

opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized

Christian terms, announced that " I shall be to this generation a new

Muhammad " and adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he

thought he had learned from Islam, " Either the Al-Koran or the

sword. " He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you

do not need another definite article, but then he did resemble

Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing out of other people's

bibles.

 

In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-

year-old man of being " a disorderly person and an impostor. " That

ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial

admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging

expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or " necromantic "

powers. However, within four years he was back in the local

newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of

the " Book of Mormon. " He had two huge local advantages which most

mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in

the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and

several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did

this local tendency become that the region became known as

the " Burned-Over District, " in honor of the way in which it had

surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was

operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening

North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.

 

A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a

considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and

amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but

also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver.

There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the

underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were

two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest

in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-

diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed

toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped

to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's

cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity

with half-baked anthropology.

 

The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and

almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr.

Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good-faith

attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible

interpretation on the relevant " events. " ) In brief, Joseph Smith

announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by

an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a

book, " written upon gold plates, " which explained the origins of

those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of

the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin

breastplates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable

Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings,

he brought this buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827,

about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set

about producing a translation.

 

The resulting " books " turned out to be a record set down by ancient

prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem

in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses,

and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of

their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way?

Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for

other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a

problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely

glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts

attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he

could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore

necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first

his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a luckless

neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah

29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to " Read, "

Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the

Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and

Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through

the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was

warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the

prophet, he would be struck dead.

 

Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the

fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen

pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his

power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far

too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks,

the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not

replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now

and open to a " satanic verses " interpretation. But the all-foreseeing

Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very

plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite

labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the

blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the

original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently

they remain to this day.

 

Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have

been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too

much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two

useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and

attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a

language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider.

However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and

stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious

task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of

Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can

mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's

View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then

popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians

originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith

on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words

of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three

hundred and fifty " names " in the book, more than one hundred come

straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as

makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it

as " chloroform in print, " but I accuse him of hitting too soft a

target, since the book does actually contain " The Book of Ether. " )

The words " and it came to pass " can be found at least two thousand

times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent

scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon " document " as at

best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie

was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable

book in 1973.

 

Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice

and often simply to suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when

he wanted a new girl and wished to take her as another wife). As a

result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having

meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his

first disciples and who had been browbeaten into taking his

dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions,

concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious

religion before our eyes.

 

It must be said for the " Latter-day Saints " (these conceited words

were added to Smith's original " Church of Jesus Christ " in 1833) that

they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed

religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born

before the exclusive " revelation, " or who died without ever having

the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve

this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his

crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead.

There is indeed a fine passage in Dante's Inferno where he comes to

rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably

been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In

another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet

Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The

Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with

something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic

genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy

filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and

deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful

if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do

not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at

special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are

given a certain quota of names of the departed to " pray in " to their

church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough

to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was

discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the

Nazi " final solution, " and were industriously baptizing what for once

could truly be called a " lost tribe " : the murdered Jews of Europe.

For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste.

I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless

think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for

hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a

problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented

religion.

 

Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion

Christopher Hitchens

Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET